As a divinatory line, six at the first place of Oppression reads within the hexagram's overall concern with one in straits may yet find progress and success; for the firm and correct, the truly great man, there is good fortune and no error, though his words will not be believed. The line occupies a place that does not match its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that bare buttocks straitened under the stump of a tree, entering a dark valley and for three years having no prospect of deliverance, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The first line corresponds by classical convention with the fourth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kan in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the opening of the situation, before the trigram above it has any part in the reading, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.
A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the first line of Oppression turns Kan into Dui while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields Oppression's changing partner, The Joyous (King Wen 58), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.