Citizenship In Antigone And Cool Hand Luke

6 Pages 1375 Words

There is a booklet distributed by the state of Georgia that lists the principle components of citizenship . They are honesty, compassion, respect, courage and responsibility. Each of these requirements represents an aspect of human personality that is characterized as “good” traits.
To better understand the vague concept of citizenship, I looked up the term on ask.com and received numerous hits regarding it. Many of the hits were definitions that mostly read “the legal status of being a citizen of a country.” When I found the booklet distributed to elementary age children and it listed all the qualities of a good citizen, I realized that maybe the reason that we, as a society, have such a vague mental definition of citizenship is possibly because the characteristics of a good citizen have been ingrained into our being since childhood. We are no longer able to differentiate being a good person and doing what is right from being a good citizen. Even though sometimes being a good person morally is not the same as being a good person according to the rules of citizenship.
Sophocles’ Antigone is a prime example of a citizen, though not a typical one. She displays all the traits previously listed in one or more ways. She shows respect by realizing that the only way that her brother would get what he had wanted would be for her to break the rules set forth by Creon. “The time in which I must please those who are dead is longer than I must please those of this world.” (Antigone, 76-77) Antigone realizes that pleasing her brother is more important than to live knowing that she should have and could have done something and didn’t. Also by showing respect for her dead brother, she is also demonstrating the compassion necessary to endanger one’s own life for the sake of the good of another.
I also believe that Antigone being honest with Creon shows another aspect of her citizenship. When she tells Creon, “Yes, I confess; I ...