Antigone is one of Sophocles’s classic Greek tragedies, which begins in the context of the antecedent action where Oedipus’s sons have been slain at each other’s hands. Antigone is retold in the allegorical novel Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. While Antigone is set in the singular geographical context of the Ancient Greek city Thebes, Home Fire centers around British-Pakistani Pasha family, retelling Antigone in a global context. Indeed, the shifting, heterogeneous geo-political environment of Home Fire results in constant challenges brought to characters’ existing beliefs and values in settings of predominantly Western culture. The implications of shifting the setting and characters from the single locality of Thebes in Antigone to a global context of the allegorical retelling in Home Fire is the complication of the conflict between people’s pre-existing beliefs, values, and education. In the local context of Antigone, conflicts are rather binary, exemplified in the conflict between loyalties to divinity and loyalties to civil law. In Home Fire, characters are very much influenced by the values and beliefs they come across in their globalized environment. In the end, both Antigone and Home Fire offer commentaries on themes of loyalty to family, state, and religion; however, the extremities with which characters are either stagnant or changed in their beliefs are ultimately the crux of each novel’s tragedy.

In Antigone, the beliefs and values characters inherit from their local environment are fixed, resulting in the dichotomous conflict between divine law and civil law. Antigone criticizes Creon’s decision to prohibit Polynices’ burial, saying, “Your edict, King, was strong / But all your strength is weakness itself against / The immortal unrecorded laws of God.” She uses the polyptoton of “strong” and “strength” to undermine her artificial praise of his law, going on to paradoxically equate his “strength” to “weakness.” In doing so, Antigone emphasizes her disregard for Creon’s edict, characterizing her as faithful to her religion and sense of duty to her family. At the same time, this underscores the hierarchy of Antigone’s beliefs: God placed above the King, and divinity placed above civil law.

On the other hand, Creon is characterized as the antithesis to Antigone. After fielding criticisms of his decision, Creon takes on an incredulous tone in asking: 

“What? should they [the Gods] honour him with burial

As one who served them well, when he had come

To burn their pillared temples, to destroy

Their treasuries, to devastate their land

And overturn its laws?”

His sarcasm demonstrates his criticism of the validity of divine law dictating mortal affairs. Unlike Antigone, his values as King and for the patriarchal organizations of family and society result in his steadfast belief that civil law be placed over those of divinity or family loyalty. He says of Antigone, “This girl already / Had fully learned the art of insolence.” Antigone’s devout, unwavering filial loyalty is reduced to “insolence”, connotative of immature disrespect. This alludes to Ancient Greece’s education of men, especially those in power like Creon. It was an expectation that women be subservient to men, but Antigone diverges from this stereotype, evoking Creon’s distaste.

Ironically, however, Antigone falls into another stereotype of Ancient Greek society—that of the unmarried, young woman of high social status. Antigone is stubborn and headstrong, which Creon perceives as a threat to his position of power and control, claiming, “No man can rule a city uprightly / Who is not just in ruling his own household.” At the same time, this demonstrates how Ancient Greece’s societal education embeds within the characters of Antigone the basis of their beliefs and values: Antigone’s loyalty to divine law and willingness to disobey authority, and Creon’s loyalty to civil law and preoccupation with maintaining respect and control. As such, it is precisely the localization of Antigone to the single setting of Thebes which exacerbates the conflict between Antigone and Creon’s dichotomous beliefs and values, manifesting in the binary conflict between divine law and civil law.

On the other hand, characters in Home Fire face constant challenges to their beliefs and values as a result of their globalized environment. This conflict is highlighted in the first part of Home Fire, centering on Isma. Isma’s name is a paronomasia of Ismene, to illustrate how she is a recontextualized adaptation of Ismene from Antigone. As a British-Pakistani, Isma’s religious faith is symbolized in her wearing a “hijab.” However, for her loyalty to her state, she also suffers antagonization and humiliation on account of her Muslim religion. For instance, before boarding a flight, she is interrogated by security and leaves after “she thanked the woman whose thumbprints were on her underwear” from searching Isma’s luggage. Isma’s sardonic tone spotlights the discrimination she is subject to because of her personal beliefs, exemplified by the oxymoronic diction of a “stranger” having touched her “underwear,” an evidently personal item of clothing. The compromization of Isma’s beliefs is cemented in her move to America, an additional locality which highlights the global context of Home Fire and how it may bring about further conflicts. On a walk, Isma “tried to catch her reflection in the water, but it was too quick, nothing like the slow-moving water-ways to which she was accustomed.” Through water imagery, Isma’s ever-changing life in America is juxtaposed with a life of stagnancy in Britain. Moreover, that her own “reflection” is elusive to her symbolizes the way in which Isma loses a sense of her identity due to the precariousness of her beliefs in Home Fire’s global context. At the end of her part of the novel, Isma stops wearing her hijab for Eamonn, a boy she’s become infatuated with. After this, when she attempts to utter a prayer, she “couldn’t make them anything other than words in a foreign language.” The religion which she once found pride and solace in becomes “foreign,” suggestive of her growing dissociation with her earliest held beliefs and values. 

In addition to her religious beliefs, the globalized context of Home Fire also compromises Isma’s loyalties to her family. Isma recalls being told “what a good thing it was, in this climate” that Isma had reported Parvaiz to the British government for terrorism. After the death of Isma’s parents, she becomes the sole provider for her twin siblings Aneeka and Parvaiz. Nevertheless, she betrays a sibling she loves and raised to appear as a “good” citizen in the eyes of a country which sees her as a threat. The apposition “in this climate” emphasizes how it is the global context of a majority Anglo-Saxon Britain which brings about Isma’s betrayal of her values of family loyalty. 

Therefore, there is a significant contrast between the nature of conflicts in Antigone and Home Fire. In the local context of Thebes in Antigone, the conflict between divine law and civil law is binary and embedded in the beliefs of its characters. On the other hand, the global context of Home Fire, the conflict between loyalties to religion, state, and family results in characters often compromising their pre-existing beliefs and values, or abandoning them entirely. 

Nevertheless, both the extremity of characters’ beliefs, values, and education, whether in their constancy or indefiniteness, are the crux of each work’s tragedy. In Antigone, Creon’s obstinate belief in his own edict results in the tragedy of Antigone’s suicide, and the subsequent suicides of Creon’s only son and wife. Antigone declares in the first act that she is “not afraid of the danger; if it means death, / It will not be the worst of deaths — death without honor.” Her macabre diction foreshadows the tragic fate that befalls her, when she kills herself before she can be killed by Creon for breaking his law. It is Creon’s insistence that the authority of civil law “must be obeyed in all things, great or small, / Just and unjust alike” which pushes her to this end. The parallelism of his language, together with the antithetical descriptions, create a quality of aphorism to represent how Creon takes the power of civil law as wisdom and an accepted fact, overruling all else. Tiresias warns Creon that the gods will “make you pay / Their price,” an idiom for their punishment of Creon. In the end, Creon agonizes over Haemon’s death, who kills himself after finding out Antigone has died: “The slayer, the slain; a father, a son. / My own stubborn ways have borne bitter fruit.” The parallelism equates Creon to “the slayer” and Haemon to “the slain,” revealing Creon’s guilt in his belief that he has caused Haemon’s death because of his “stubborn ways.” The “bitter fruit” is a metaphor for the tragic ending which has befallen because of his own faults. Creon ultimately laments, “There is no happiness where there is no wisdom; / No wisdom but in submission to the gods.” The anadiplosis of “no wisdom” equates happiness to observing divine law. Without it, Creon’s life ended in tragedy, and therefore the theme of Antigone also becomes rather binary and one-sided: that divine law should be obeyed over anything else. 

In Home Fire, Eamonns’ beliefs and values change vastly from his initial desire to be his father’s son, resulting in the tragedy of deaths of him and Aneeka, Isma’s younger sister. First introduced in Isma’s part of the novel, Isma mocks Eamonn’s name: “An Irish spelling to disguise a Muslim name – ‘Ayan’ as ‘Eamonn’ so that people would think his father had integrated.” Eamonn’s name is also a paronomasia of Haemon from Antigone. But unlike Haemon, Eamonn is afflicted by the internal conflict over loyalty to the country he has “integrated” with, Britain, and the place where “his father” came from, Pakistan, as a result of the global context of Home Fire. Upon hearing Eamonn speak of his desire to be like his father, Isma notes that “for girls, becoming a woman was an inevitability; for boys, becoming men was an ambition.” The parallelism of this phrase highlights the contrast between the natural course of growing up in opposition to Eamonn’s, coming of age. Her diction of “ambition” connotes that Eamonn makes a purposeful dedication to become a man like his father, including his father’s forgoing of his Pakistani heritage and dissociation with the Muslim cultural minority in the United Kingdom. The tragic end to Eamonn’s internal conflict is foreshadowed by the symbol of a parachutist Isma sees before seeing Eamonn for the first time, a metaphor for Eamonn’s failure to live up to his father’s image. Isma likens the parachutist to Icarus, “hurtling down, his father, Daedalus, following too slowly to catch the vainglorious boy.” The allusion to the Greek myth, which is significant for the text’s Greek foundations, indicates that it is Eamonn’s rejection of his father’s beliefs and values which allows him to find newfound freedom; however, just as Icarus ignored his father’s warning and flew too close to the sun, Eamonn ignores his father’s warnings and falls in love with Aneeka, resulting in his tragic end. 

Aneeka is the catalyst for Eamonn’s shift in beliefs and values. After they sleep together for the first time, “he couldn’t help watching this woman, this stranger, prostrating herself to God in the room where she’d been down on her knees for a very different purpose just hours earlier.” While he previously held his father’s dissociation from Muslim religion, Eamonn becomes fascinated with Aneeka, who is devoutly religious. The visual imagery of “down on her knees” evokes both the image of her praying, but also of her fellating Eamonn, blurring the lines between the religion Eamonn rejected and the woman he is enamored with. When he finds out that Aneeka has manipulated him in an effort to repatriate her twin brother who had joined ISIS, Eamonn thinks of “the black-and-white flag, the British-accented men who stood beneath it and sliced men’s heads off their shoulders. And the media unit, filming it all.” The structure of the asyndetic listing of images is climactic, depicting Eamonn’s anagnorisis in realizing he was used by Aneeka. Nevertheless, he forgives Aneeka and stays by her side as she tries to retrieve her brother’s body from Syria when he is killed. In an end that is analogous to that of Icarus, Eamonn is embroiled in Aneeka’s conflict through their romance, leading to this death and the tragedy of Home Fire.  Ultimately, Antigone exemplifies the idea of unidimensional characters and conflict. Antigone and Creon are both steadfast in their loyalties to either divine law or civil law as a result of the local context of Antigone’s setting. Oppositely, Home Fire diverges from Antigone’s setting of a single cultural locality. Indeed, the title itself may suggest that tragedies can arise due to the global context of diverse loyalties centralized in one nation or “home”. Nevertheless, despite these differences, Sophocles and Shamsie both demonstrate how extremities in each of their characters’ beliefs and values led to the tragedies that befell them.