Like Oedipus, Orestes is confronted with the unsparing vision of his crime. He rejects the last weapon against despair, rationality. He knows the colossal irony of his act. He has sunk to the last stages of ignominy for nothing, for a promise that Hermione unconscionably repudiates. Rarely has a playwright conjured up such a mood of bleak despair.
The irony of his fate is further underlined by the fact that once again--and despite all his efforts to the contrary--he has done nothing to deserve it. He intended to kill Pyrrhus, but his weapon never actually touched his intended victim.
The introduction of Orestes' madness and his persecution by the Eumenides is in strict conformity with the legend. But Racine is obviously motivated by more than respect for tradition. He wants to sustain the mood and end the play on an authentically tragic note. The major features of tragedy are skillfully integrated and easily discernible.
Orestes' misfortune is not a fortuitous event. It has been engineered by a hostile fate and is thus elevated above a mere romantic imbroglio. Furthermore, the gods confer on him the dreadful distinction of making his suffering particularly harrowing, beyond calculation.
Orestes, in turn, reacts with a defiance, a kind of grandeur that lifts him above the common mortal. Instead of indulging in self-pity, he prepares to kill himself on the bodies of Pyrrhus and Hermione, to find in the physical unity of the three warring individuals a semblance of victory over a destiny which pitted them against one another.
A truer victory over fate is implicit in the triumph of Andromache, who has been recognized as a legitimate ruler and whose reign promises to endure. That too is characteristic of tragedy. For whatever the havoc wreaked in the play, the final vision is that of order, expressed originally in a pattern of death and rebirth in the ritualistic nature of primitive drama.
Racine, however, does not dwell on the reassuring element. The play ends on the harrowing note of Orestes' madness and its prospect of endless suffering.
