Antigone Pendulum Sit

	Antigone is widely considered a classic Greek play, telling the story of one woman’s struggle to give her fallen brother a proper burial. Just like any other good play, Antigone has a cast of very detailed and ornate characters. Three of these characters are the titular Antigone, Creon, king of Thebes, and his son, Haemon. Antigone is a woman with honorable motives, trying to bring peace to her brother and the gods. Creon is a tyrannous ruler who acts with clouded judgement and sets decrees without thinking of the possible consequences. Haemon, unlike his father, is a forward thinking young man who would die before having harm come to his loved one.
	Before we get to the character analysis, I would like to note that Antigone very closely resembles a pendulum. A pendulum is a wondrous object,  swinging back and forth, back and forth with an orderly rhythm. This rhythm is often used to describe the balance between time and space, how the controlled swing of the pendulum keeps the universe in check. If one were to touch the pendulum, it would alter its path and speed, thus disrupting the space-time continuum. Through my analysis of the play, Antigone is a scenario in which that continuum has been disrupted.
	First off is Antigone, the main character who tries to keep the balance. Antigone’s twin brothers,  Polyneices and Eteocles, were the two “scales” that kept the city of Thebes together; they were the ones next in line for the city’s throne, and they kept the balance of the pendulum. However, they suddenly broke the balance when the two waged war on one another, both having perished in battle. While Eteocles has been properly buried, Polyneices has been deemed a traitor and thus left to rot in the fields for the dogs and scavengers. Not only does she love both her brothers and wish for them both to rest in peace, she knows that this is wrong, as it is not Creon’s choice to say what to do with the corpse. “Your edict, King, was strong, But all your strength is weakness itself against The immortal unrecorded laws of God. They are not merely now: they were, and shall be, Operative forever, beyond man utterly.” It is the gods’ wishes and standard procedures that matter, and if Polyneices does not properly arrive to Hades, there will be dire consequences. The gods are all-powerful, celestial beings, and are an enormous part of space. If they were to be angered, the spatial distortions would be enough wrath to make anyone cower in fear. Antigone does not want this for her people, and demonstrates her stubbornness and boldness when she is brought to Creon’s court. She stands by what she did all the way until her execution.
	On the other hand, Creon is quite the opposite of Antigone. He is the one continuing the disruptions in the world, yet fails to recognize the magnitude of his crimes. “Stop! Must you doddering wrecks go out of your heads entirely? ‘The gods!’ Intolerable! The gods favor this corpse? Why? How had he served them?” He is unaware that Polyneices, just like everyone else, is but a servant of the gods. He is a weak-minded fool, unlike most other characters in this play. Creon first antagonizes Antigone and her beliefs, as well as the great seer Teiresias. However, he is instantly influenced by Teiresias’ words and becomes “hypnotized” to do the right thing. He is a poor ruler, and is easily one of the strongest, yet weakest, character in the play.
	Haemon is King Creon’s son, set to marry Antigone in the near future. He, like Antigone, is well informed on the right thing to do. However, his arguments are not so much towards the proper burial of Polyneices but more so towards defending his love, Antigone. He, like Antigone, is very passionate, both openly defying his father for Antigone but also showing respect to his king at the same time. It might be wondered how we know that there are indeed fluxes in the space-time continuum. Haemon demonstrates why there is a disruption quite clearly in a dialogue between him and his father. “You consider it right for a man of my years and experience to go to school to a boy?” “It is not right If I am wrong. But if I am young, and right, What does my age matter?” Since ancient times, such as the period of Ancient Greece in which this play was written, filial piety has been a central part of culture. In an ordinary case, Haemon would have listened to his father, his elder. However, with Creon refusing to repair the damage to their current reality, the “time” of “space-time” is still irregular. The greater age of Creon over Haemon does not matter anymore, for with Time in flux, ages do not mean a thing, and thus Haemon’s argument is valid, and Creon indeed has much to learn from his son.
	Antigone, Creon, and Haemon are the three characters central to my interpretation of Antigone. In summary, Antigone and Haemon are similar characters, while Creon is quite polar from the former two. However, all three share the same passion for what they believe in, whether it is right or wrong or simply an affair of the heart. They did their part to keep the pendulum in motion, with Antigone’s push to restore the rhythm of the world, Creon’s misguided swing that failed to heal the shattered remains, and Haemon, whose suicide at the end of the play finally brought Creon to his senses and shifted the pendulum back into balance. These people, despite having  illustrated characters, are merely anthropomorphic representations of a simple concept: The space-time pendulum. Antigone is a reality where chaos broke free, and is a cautionable tale for us all to keep the order.