PLOT STRUCTURE ANALYSIS
Aristotle in his Poetics praises Sophocles as an innovator in tragedy. The introduction of a third actor (“tritagonist”) enabled Sophocles to make plot, dialogue and the relationship between characters more complex. He abandoned the Aeschylean practice of writing trilogies on related events; instead, he gave each of his plays a self-contained plot. In Sophoclean plays, the unity of action is complete and the plot is handled with amazing dexterity and at a rapid pace.
For Sophocles, it is the innate character of a heroine, like Antigone, that initiates the central tragic action. Sometimes, the central Sophoclean character (as in Antigone) dies well before the end of the play, resulting in a slight slackening of the tension in the action. However, the concluding part still seems to follow necessarily from what has preceded. For example, the deaths of Haemon and Eurydice are the result of Antigone’s death and add to the final tragic effect. Sophocles rarely distracts attention from the self- contained world of his play. The outlines of his story are drawn from a well-known body of myth, already familiar to the audience