This chapter demonstrates that Sophocles’ Electra is pervaded by a strong sense of the fragility of human language and perception, drawing the spectators’ attention to the characters’ partial and often superficial understanding of events and conceptual categories such as familial strife, ancestral suffering, revenge and justice. The chapter focuses in turn on Orestes, Electra and the Paedagogus, analysing their experience of the tragedy’s reality and attempting to trace the larger networks of agency at work in their lives. Like Deianeira, Antigone or Creon, these characters operate in a world that is characterised by obscurity and constant upheaval; yet in Electra, the gods and the broad causal patterns governing the cosmos are more remote and elliptical than ever. Thus, the play can be located within the same intellectual, religious and philosophical traditions as other Sophoclean tragedies – but it engages with, and builds on, these traditions in a different way and to different effects, particularly in its radical questioning of humans’ ability to communicate successfully with the divine, and thus to access any kind of reality.