Oedipus

'You know the best thing about what you wrote?' the boy went on, and Tomas could see the effort it cost him to speak. 'Your refusal to compromise. Your clear-cut sense of what's good and what's evil, something we're beginning to lose. We have no idea any more what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent, in hs soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.'