The hero exiled from his native land and forced to wander has served as a central figure in the literature of Western civilization for centuries and has a number of antecedents from outside that part of the world. Gilgamesh in Babylonian literature is a prototype, and examples can be found in Norse literature, Egyptian literature, and Chinese literature as well. Such a figure allows for consideration of the displacement of institutions of social power as the wanderer is forced out of his own place of power because of some transgression for which he must atone or because of which he becomes an outsider with a different view of the world he left behind. Two such characters are Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus and Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
The essence of the Oedipus myth revolves around personal responsibility in the Greek conception. Even though Oedipus appears to be the victim of a series of circumstances so that what happens to him should be no fault of his own, in the Greek view this is not the case. The structure of the three plays by Sophocles covering this myth--Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone--shows that Oedipus should have known what he was doing even if he did not and that his stubbornness in the face of growing evidence as to his crime leads to his downfall. These plays are known as the Theban plays because they tell the story of the royal house of Thebes. Thebes was founded by Cadmus, son of the king of Phoenicia, who was told by the oracle of Apollo that he was to settle in a certain country where he would find a cow in a field. He should follow the cow, and where she stopped, there should Cadmus found a city and call it Thebes. King Laius was the third in descent from Cadmus, and he married his cousin, Jocasta. The oracle of Apollo warned Laius that he would die at the hands of his son, so the king tied the child up and left it to die on a mountaintop. Thereafter, Thebes wa...