school discussion imitating life

Today, in my linguistics class, we talked about the concept of face. Your public image. How you want others to perceive you and what image you choose to project. We talked about saving, maintaining, and loosing face. Seeing how I recently tried to save face by putting a security restriction on my blog, I thought today's topic was pertinent.

Reflecting on this subject, I notice that I think you all must think I'm unhappy and define myself by my problems. But that's probably not the case. But I do notice that I spend a lot of time talking about the problems in my home life. I would rather talk about topics that interest me and people that I like, but 9 times out of 10 I'm talking about who did what to me and how that upsets me. So for that I'm sorry.

So, I'll spend this paragraph talking about a paper that I should be writing. I am writing a comparative paper about Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Seamus Heaney's Burial at Thebes. My research question is, knowing the intention of a writer through interviews or published material and finding evidence in their work that supports their views and/or thoughts, can you surmise a writer's views and/or thoughts from their work if you don't have supplementary evidence? The reason why I compare the two playwrights and plays is because they were both written at a time when a large scale war was going on. In Sophocles' time, the Peloponnesian War was taking place and when Heaney wrote his play the Iraqi War had begun. More specifically, I want to argue in my paper like Heaney's Creon was a mirror to Bush, Sophocles' Oedipus is a mirror to Pericles (if you know your Greek history). Wish me luck on it.