once again i turn to NS. theres no slots open at the writing center tomorrow so i have noone to edit my paper other than my friends, who are as writing retarded as me. its due tomorrow at 5, so heres the deal. Come on here and edit my paper. this can be grammatical or logic or whatever, but whoever makes the most substantial positive changes to my paper i will paypal you $10, no questions asked. i will also send it as a gift so no fees are taken out. basically, after i turn my paper in tomorrow, ill come back in, thank everyone, and decide whos post was the most helpful. ill pm u asking for your email, and i send you $10
ALSO, if youve read Sophocle's Electra, i will pay $5 for the best (read:relevant) quote that i insert into the final paper that i turn in.
so you could make $15 for 15 minutes of work. not too shabby. heres the paper, youre the shit NS, and save me all the time, i know:
Sophocles is a playwright that favors simplicity. By breaking a story down into a few key deeply emotional lines, he is able to drive a play through a plot in the way conversations drive everyday life. He believes individual action is more important to real life, and therefore to the play, than characterization. Much in the way Aristotle thought, Sophocles cuts-away added monologues for a leaner, meaner play with a confident, meaningful, well-structured plot. His thought is that characterization is just an replication of an individual and real life doesn’t work that way. In his creation of confident, comfortable characters that are able to express themselves simply and powerfully, Sophocles creates a sense of real world emotion in his audience that cannot be attained through characterization.
Differences in Sophocles’s version of the Electra story can be seen immediately in the introduction of a new character. The Tutor opens up the story in Argos with Orestes and Pylades, and immediately plays a major role by explaining Orestes’s fate. After delivering Oreste’s fate from Apollo as told by the Oracle, the Tudor insists that Orestes depart before the entrance of Electra.
From here on out, Electra effectively controls the plot of the play, spending most of her time on stage spewing emotions in desperation. While she effectively participates in no action herself, she is very successful in provoking action that the others (men) carry out. Electras isolation is apparent, as she is a woman confined within palace walls, yet Sophocles proves her effectiveness through her emotions. Sophocles seemed to think that the women were emotional (read: irrational) while the men were rational and logical, and therefore the men carried out actions while the women stayed confined to their quarters.
The Tutor returns to the scene when he is the first to inform Electra of Orestes’s fatal chariot race. This is all part of the Tutor driving the plot from the background of the play. By making all dialogues succinct, rather than using lengthy monologues, Sophocles is better able to drive the plot of the play, rather than focus on characterization. This is more of a “real life†approach to drama, in the sense that the drive through “life†(the plot) is more important than character description/dialogue. The other Playwrights of the Electra story tended to focus on the characterization to increase the dramatics of the play and influence the emotions of the audience, but Sophocles preferred to “let actions speak louder than words†and rather build plot structure. The simplicity in important lines seems to make them sink deeper into the audience, rather than surrounding them with excessive dialogue. The mimicking of life sacrifices dramatics but provides a strong plotline.
Another major change in Sophocle’s version of the Electra play is in the “recognition sceneâ€. Sophoclese delays the scene of Electra’s recognition of Orestes til near the end of the play to provide an expressive pinnacle for the drama. Because Electra’s emotions have been building throughout the course of the play, the recognition scene brings about an emotional climax which the deaths of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus cant hope to match. While Electra’s exaggerated behavior almost sabotages the plot, it has the audience feeling the emotions of the event.
This scene also brings about Sophocles’s use of an object as a device to focus and externalize an issue. When Orestes enters the recognition scene, Electra doesn’t actually know he is Orestes, she thinks he is a messenger there to deliver the news of Orestes’s death and the ashes of her brother. After Orestes witnesses the deep emotional breakdown of Electra after seeing the urn that contains her brother’s ashes, Orestes feels obliged to tell the truth, thus, leading to the recognition. The urn serves as a sort of trigger on the gun that releases Electra from the captivity of the palace. By realizing Orestes is there to carry out his fate and kill those who killed Orestes’s and Electra’s father, Electra is released from the emotional captivity of the palace. She releases all of her emotion in an extravagant display of sentiment.
Sophocles then continues to change the stories of the other two playwrights in his handling of the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. First off, Sophocles switches the order of the murders, then passes right over Orestes’s murder of Clytemnestra to the murder of Aegisthus. By bypassing the issue of matricide, Sophocles gives a sense of justice in not raising any questions about the rightness of the act. He doesn’t create the emotional height that the other plays did out of the murder of Clytemnestra, and leaves it as simply an “appropriate act†that is not accompanied by the torment of conscience of Euripides’s version or the threat of the furies of Aegisthus’s version.
The audience would have accepted that the murder is punishment for clytemnestra’s own crime. By leaving the murder to just Apollo’s authorization, Sophocles again shows his brilliant simplicity. Additionally, he sides with fate and lessens the human fault in the situation by breezing by the subject. Concurrently, Sophocles moves right past the murder of Clytemnestra to show the importance in the murder of Aegisthus. Because the murder of Aegisthus was avenging the murder of his father and taking his position on the throne, Sophocles is able to make a rapid conclusion and leave the audience emotionally struck.
By the time Aegisthus appears, Clytemnestra is already gone and hidden away under a sheet, and Orestes has only briefly discussed the situation with Electra. Here, Sophocles is allowed to make a final point on the individualism of the characters as well as the emotional strength of plot rather than characterization. Sophocles once again shows that he believes in the simplicity of intense, concentrated dialogue charged with significance and a driven plot line rather than lengthy characterizing monologues. In the same was that Electra, though bound by her social role, is able to express so much through simple lines; Sophocles is able to express so much by moving through a strong plotline even though he may be considered bound by his “inability†to characterize.
In general, Sophocles creates a strong Electra unmoving in her isolation, yet not accepting of the wretched situation she is handed in the way Chrysothemis does. While she doesn’t wield the sword that she may have in other versions, she avenges the murder of her father simply by not accepting the despotism of her mother in silence. Her strong and simple lines express an emotion just waiting to be released in the recognition scene, and finally be avenged through the actions of Orestes. Orestes is made a strong character through his anxiousness, as this shows his comfort in the Tutor’s plan. In turn, this shows Sophocles belief in fate as the Oracles, and further, Apollos orders are followed without haste, unarmed and alone on the part of Orestes.
By and large, Sophocles’s style of writing plays comes off as both realistic and logical. The intelligent members of his audience would likely have preferred his approach to drama over that of his predecessors, as he is able to create believable situations through real interactions of the characters and in effect charge true sentiment on the part of the crowd through the convincing emotions of the characters.
thank you thank you and thank you. and +k to everyone that posts in this thread.
