When Oedipus rushes into the palace at line 1185 of the Oedipus Tyrannus we have a sense of dramatic fulfilment which, most people would say, is about as much as one play can offer. The process of getting us to this moment of climax has been so satisfyingly managed and our emotions kept at such tension before the instant of release that it is hard not to feel overwhelmed when the resolution of so much theatrical energy takes effect. We are tempted to ask no more of the dramatist: he can do what he likes with us, provided that he does it gently and recognises that our resources of pity and fear have been drained by what we have been through.
So it has been customary to regard the part of the play that follows 1185 as a leisurely declension from the high point of the discovery to the flat land of acquiescence: no new material but an absorption of the old, a gradual accommodation to the horror of the revelation. In keeping with this view the critical literature has often found very little to say about this closing scene. Yet there is evidence enough that the scene is something more than a winding-down. Its very dimensions should set us wondering. That Sophocles should use almost a quarter of his playing-time, not to clinch something in his final scene, but to offer unproductive and undemanding comment on a now played-out play, looks like dramatic and poetic waste. In fact the material of the scene takes us not down but up. There is a design at work that lets the play grow again. Oedipus finds his way back into the world and it is not hard to chart his progress through a number of stages that are separable and display a distinct identity, each of them contributing a little more to the cumulative effect. The play is really doing another kind of building towards another kind of climax. Immediately after the discovery there is a flatness of exhaustion, but from that low point the dramatist works to generate new tensions and excitements around the figure of Oedipus. When he and his daughters meet the play is back on high ground. To change the image, the progress of Oedipus could be compared with the return of a deep-sea diver from the ocean bed; he pauses at one pressure-level after another, getting used to the new conditions, and then proceeds to the next holding-station on the way to the surface.