This analysis of Sophocles’ extant tragedies focuses on problems caused by various instances of text within the text. Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Trachiniae, Electra, Ajax and Philoctetes are closely read through a lense consisting of key concepts of psychoanalytical theory (Freud, Lacan, Felman) and the chosen points of structuralist and anthropological theory as well (Girard, Lévi-Strauss). The problems arising in the circumstances when the characters in tragedies are confronted with prophecies, riddles, curses and lies, representing phenomena recognized as text within the text, are examined attentively. The analysis is based upon the interweaving of quotes of the original classical texts and psychoanalitical notions that suggest reading per se is a complicated and multifaceted problem. In Sophocles’ tragedies the text which defies reading appears in the key points of the tragic action, and by undermining the characters effort to read the text and survive, it guarantees the character’s tragic downfall. By not being able to read the text and understand its meaning in a timely manner, the character eventually succumbs to death or fate worse than death. When the psychoanalytical notion of thorough and correct reading as an impossible activity is brought into the discussion of text within the text in Sophocles’ tragedies, the main course of this analysis reveals reading as a deeply tragic endeavor. To the extent the characters’ encounters with the insufferable instances of text prove themselves as essential elements of the tragic plot, the network of characters’ interrelations revealed by the text shows itself equally important when it comes to their destruction. The text combined with its consequences forms a number of dense and insoluble knots within the course of each of Sophocles’ tragedies. The main characteristic that enables the convoluted text to deceive and show resistance to its reader is the inherent ambiguity of the text itself. Its multiple meanings generate further multiplications of its layers and lead Sophocles’ characters to the tragic turn (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis) which ensure their demise during the final solution. The investigation of phenomena of text within the text leads to the conclusion that the text figures as the main instigator of the knots in the tragic action, the only escape from its disasterous work lies in the moment of death.