The Oedipus Myth. Structure - Motifs - Plot

Looking beyond Sophocles' Theban plays that provide the best-known depiction of the tragic story of the son who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, Vladimir Pimonov examines the Oedipus myth as a sum of all the recorded versions to reveal its invariant structure. Taking philological, linguistic and structuralist perspectives, the book offers a fundamental reinterpretation of many aspects of the myth based on the hidden meanings of some pivotal words in the Ancient Greek sources. The author argues that the famous riddle of the Sphinx (“Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”) that Oedipus solved with the answer “Man”, contains a camouflaged motif of a horseman that permeates the myth as a whole. Besides, the riddle is described as a mathematical allegory related to number symbolism of the myth. The author suggests that the story of Oedipus is a result of adjustment of a traditional folktale to the ancient numerological riddle by way of using imagery to convey the themes of “numbers” and “feet”. One of the chapters focuses on the revenge motif which unfolds through foreshadowing, prefiguring the alternation of the acts of murder and revenge. The Oedipus Myth. Structure – Motifs – Plot is an up-to-date study that will be of interest to students, scholars as well as the general reader.