Fate and Oedipus

Oedipus is ignorant of essential facts about himself and his life, and his ignorance of such facts leads to disaster. Oedipus does not know that he has killed his father and married his mother. The question must be asked whether Oedipus---the king at the top of his power as we meet him, but headed for tragedy---could have altered his fate if he had known the facts on which his life was built. Sophocles is writing in an era which believed that the gods mysteriously ran human lives. Oedipus had no way of knowing he had killed his father and married his mother---until it was too late and disaster was assured. It would seem, then, that Oedipus is helpless to alter his fate. One cannot change something when he does not know what it is that he is to avoid doing or

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he assumed not with humility but with pride, with the expectation that he deserved to be leader of others. Failure was unthinkable. To that point, when he started on the search for the source of the curse on his city, Oedipus had had no indication of the doom awaiting him, no indication that he was on a horribly wrong track. Oedipus believed himself to be at the center of suffering (caused by the drought which was in turn the gods' curse for Oedipus having, unknowingly, slain his father and wed his mother). Oedipus sees himself as a good man whose role of leader calls for him to suffer in such a way: "My soul mourns at once for the city, and for myself, and for you" (1085). Oedipus is, in effect, trying to be something he is not, a perfect king, but he cannot be perfect because it is only the gods who can be perfect. He must pay for his hubris, despite the fact that the form of his payment is in two acts---murder and marriage---which he did not and could not have fully understood. Again, we have compassion for Oedipus because it seems clear that he was a victim of the gods, who had set up his life to end in tragedy. He participated in the making of this tragedy because of his pride, his ambition, his forgetting to be humble e
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Approximate Word count = 1795
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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