What is Oedipus Rex about?

If you can’t face reading the play in its entirety, just check out the cliff notes.

@gailcalled I never even thought of that. Thanks.

The play is about a lot of things, but the part that’s relevant to “The End” is that Oedipus winds up killing his father and marrying his mother. Freud used this story as a metaphor for what he believed was a universal stage of psychosexual development in which children react negatively to their father and become possessive of their mother (see Oedipus complex). Jim Morrison was referencing the Freudian idea, but it is still ultimately derived from the Sophocles play.

All I know about Oedipus Rex I’ve learned from Tom Lehrer.

I’m not saying how much of everything else I’ve learned from him, though.

Basically, what @SavoirFaire said, it pretty much sums it up. However, I would like to stress that while the concepts are the same, the context is entirely different, since in Oedipus Rex, he never intended to kill his father and marry his mother and was horrified to find out he had done so. Freud used it metaphorically, as did Morrison, but the two are derived from different themes and concepts. I’m particular about these things..

The original mofo.