Integrity in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone :: Antigone essays

Integrity in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone  Ã‚   The distinctions between young and old, naà ¯ve and wise are very clear. There is a fiery passion for life often embedded in the young, and a sense of bittersweet reflection set in the aged. The age gap between the two is often a cause for conflict. The young want to hurry up and live only to eventually die; the old want to slow down their rate of living and postpone death. With such divergent circumstances, conflicts are almost impossible to avoid. The question of how one can grow old while keeping youthful 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.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The play opens, after the introduction by Chorus, with Antigone rushing in from a night that the audience 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 before 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 not 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 seeking out danger. When Antigone's sister Ismene enters the play, the audience is given the explanation for Antigone's breathless nighttime escapades. The Nurse exits, allowing the girls to talk, and Ismene begins to speak of the possibility of a death sentence being issued for the two of them.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  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 face the execution. She makes it clear to Ismene that there are no two ways about it. "That's the way it is. What do you think we can do to change it?" she says (11). She also tells Ismene that she is not eager to die, but it seems to the audience otherwise throughout the progression of the play.