I've been thinking a lot lately about Antigone.

I met her, it should be noted, not through her original narrator, but a far later one, Jean Anouilh, who found in her story currents that reflected his own time, the time of Occupation, the time of fear. A time not unlike our own.

Let’s start by summarizing. (Hang in there with me, it’s a little complicated!) You’ll remember Oedipus, king of Thebes, who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother? His two sons settled on a way of ruling the city: one would be king for ten years, and then it would pass to the other brother for the next ten years. Not unlike our current president, Eteocles didn’t want to stop being king when his time was up; his brother Polynice attacked the city to take his turn, and both brothers ended up dead. Oedipus’ brother Creon became king and declared that Eteocles would be properly buried, while Polynice’s body would be left for the dogs.

Enter Antigone (finally!), the antagonists’ sister, who defied her uncle’s decree and buried her brother’s body—or attempted to, anyway. She did it knowing she would be executed; and it has to be said that Creon bent over backwards to give her the opportunity to renounce her actions, though to no avail.

Anouilh’s Antigone differs from Sophocles’ version. The action unrolls seamlessly through a single scene, in a single space, without breaking temporal continuity, and it’s the conflict of authority between Antigone and Creon that’s at the core of his vision. Creon is doing the “right” thing in his own eyes: his refusal to bury a man who attacked his own brother and—more importantly—his own city is a rightful punishment. And Antigone is also “right,” honoring a brother who has been kind to her in the past, but also showing that there’s a higher authority than civic rules. She knows her death is both inevitable and useless—no matter how many times she scratches in the earth, Polynice will remain unburied. And still she does it.

So why has she been on my mind?

Part of it is that very helplessness. Anouilh’s Antigone is small in every way, a thin girl who, the Narrator tells is, “is thinking. She is thinking that in a little while she’s going to have to be Antigone, that she’s going to transform from the dark thin withdrawn young girl who was never taken seriously by her family, and stand up alone against the world, against Creon, her uncle, who is the king. She is thinking that she’s going to die, that she is young, and that she would have liked to live. But there’s nothing to be done. Her name is Antigone and she will have to play her part to the end.” And yet in playing her part, she manages to make a gesture, however futile, that honors what is truly good and just.

I am apparently not alone in thinking about her these days. Rhoda Feng in The Paris Review wrote recently about the recent proliferation of plays about Antigone. “For a few weeks this spring,” she writes, “you couldn’t swing a thyrsus in New York without hitting a play about Antigone.” It’s interesting to see so many versions—Feng cites five of them—that, like Anouilh, have made radical adaptations of the original.

Interpretations will always vary wildly, but many modern playwrights and audiences seem comfortable assigning Antigone as a heroine of the resistance (whether with a capital or lowercase “r”). Anouilh doesn’t allow for political interpretations: again and again Antigone admits, even claims, the absurdity and futility of her actions. “I don’t want to understand,” she tells Creon. “That’s fine for you. But I’m here for something else. I’m here to say no to you and to die.”

That resonated for French people when they were occupied by Germany. It resonates for us, too, as we feel paralyzed with helplessness: it often feels like our own resistance is about saying no, about doing the right thing, and sometimes, for some of us, to die. It feels absurd and futile. And yet it is what we’re compelled to do when faced with injustice.

“Maybe,” writes Gregor Moder in Antigone as Political Philosophy, “sets an example precisely with the substantive emptiness of her deed, with the absence of any comprehensible intention, with a hiatus or gap in which we can set our own stake and our own potential subjectivity.”

Spoiler alert: Antigone died. And died for… what? That is what I’m thinking about these days. About sacrifice, and valor, and being willing to die for what is important, even if no one else really understands our reasons. About becoming something bigger, and better, and more consequential. We can all do it.

The question will always be: will we?

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