Integrity in Jean Anouilh's Antigone The distinctions between young and old, naive and wise are very clear. There is a burning passion for life often ingrained in young people and a bittersweet sense of reflection in older people. The age difference between the two is often a source of conflict. Young people want to hurry up and live and then die; old people want to slow down the pace of their lives and postpone death. With such divergent circumstances, conflicts are almost impossible to avoid. The question of how one can grow old while maintaining the idealism and integrity of youth seems to be the source of most conflict. Jean Anouilh, in his version of the classical Greek play Antigone, firmly captures and reflects the disparity between old and young through the use of the characters of Antigone and Creon. The opera opens, after the introduction of the chorus, with Antigone bursting out of a night that the audience can only interpret as a night to be lived fully. She details her nocturnal adventures, enthusiastically proclaiming that she was out enjoying the world as it lay untouched before morning. “The whole world was breathless, waiting,” he tells the Nurse (7). She evades the questions asked of her by the nurse and it becomes apparent to the audience that she has been out doing something she shouldn't have been doing. This alone presents Antigone as a girl who wants to live at all costs. It seems that living, for her, means breaking the rules and seeking danger. When Antigone's sister Ismene enters the play, the audience is given the explanation for Antigone's breathless nocturnal escapades. The Nurse leaves, leaving the girls to talk, and Ismene begins to talk about the possibility of a death sentence for the two of them. Creon, the king and their uncle, issued an edict to the people of Thebes that the rebel Polynices, brother of Ismene and Antigone, was not to be buried on pain of death. Antigone explains in what seems like a rational tone that she and Ismene are obliged, as if by duty, to bury Polyneices and face execution. He makes Ismene understand that there are no two ways. "That's the way things are. What do you think we can do to change that?" she says (11). She also tells Ismene that she is not anxious to die, but it seems otherwise to the audience throughout the progression of the show..