Integrity in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone :: Antigone essays

Integrity in blue jean Anouilhs Antigone The distinctions mingled with young and old, nave and wise are in truth clear. There is a fiery passion for life often embed in the young, and a sense of bittersweet reflection set in the aged. The age gap between the two is often a engender for conflict. The young want to hurry up and live only to finally die the old want to slow down their rate of support and postpone death. With such divergent circumstances, conflicts are almost impossible to avoid. The interrogative sentence of how one idler grow old while keeping new-made idealism and integrity seems to be the source of most conflicts. Jean Anouilh, in his version of the Greek classic play Antigone, firmly captures and reflects the disparity between old and young through the use of the characters of Antigone and Creon. The play opens, after the adit by Chorus, with Antigone rushing in from a night that the earshot can take only to be a night of living fully. She describes her nocturnal adventures with detail, proclaiming excitedly that she had been out enjoying the world as it lay untouched onwards morning. The whole world was breathless, waiting, she tells the Nurse (7). She evades the questions put to her by the Nurse, and it becomes apparent to the audience that she has been out doing something she should non have been. This in itself immediately presents Antigone as a girl who wants to live at all costs. It seems that living, to her, means breaking rules and pursuit out danger. When Antigones sister Ismene enters the play, the audience is given the explanation for Antigones breathless night escapades. The Nurse exits, allowing the girls to talk, and Ismene begins to speak of the possibility of a death sentence cosmos issued for the two of them. Creon, the king and their uncle, issued an edict to the people of Thebes that the rebel Polynices, brother to Ismene and Antigone, should not be buried on pain of death. Antigone explains in what seems to be a rational tone that she and Ismene are bound, as by duty, to bury Polynices and spunk the execution. She makes it clear to Ismene that there are no two ways active it. Thats the way it is. What do you think we can do to change it? she says (11). She as well tells Ismene that she is not eager to die, but it seems to the audience otherwise throughout the onward motion of the play.