Why does Oedipus blind himself?

Oedipus blinds himself when he can no longer deny that he killed Laius and married Jocasta, his mother. Sight in the play has meant arrogant clarity; after Jocasta hangs herself, he takes brooches from her robe and gouges his eyes so he will not have to look at his children — who are also his siblings — or at the city he polluted.

The act is self-punishment and symbolic reversal: the man who mocked Teiresias’s blindness becomes blind himself, while finally “seeing” truth. He does not suicide; he chooses a living exile of darkness, asking Creon to banish him so Thebes might recover. Classroom answers should tie physical blinding to the blindness-and-sight theme rather than treating it as random horror — Sophocles makes Oedipus’s last voluntary act match the knowledge he demanded.