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Never In Control: A Certain Kind Of Eden By Kay Ryan

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Recommended: Character analysis of Oedipus

Never In Control
Life is a series of decisions we make for ourselves, but imagine finding out you were never in control of any of those decisions. How do you think you would react if what you thought you knew was false? Our reactions to the things we can not change can uproot all of our beliefs causing us to feel powerless.
In the poem “A Certain Kind of Eden” Kay Ryan expands on the idea that people's lifes are already set in stone and there is no changing the past. The speaker is telling us “you can’t go back and pull the roots and runners and replant.”(Ryan2-3). It is not possible for people to redo their previous actions no matter how hard they try to change them, it is important to realize that your problems do not go away when you ignore them they keep growing in the present and are not left in the past. This is stated in “ But those things keep growing where we plant them.”(10-11) In “A Certain Kind of Eden” the idea that the past is unchangeable is linked to Oedipus the King with the idea Oedipus could not go back nor did he ever have control of his past actions but the hope of becoming the savior clouds a personal judgment. Oedipus works hard to avoid his fate yet he never takes time to see how his actions affect the possibility of making that fate come true. All of his thoughts throughout the play are rash and unplanned, …show more content…

He is finally showing the qualities of a good leader when it's too late. The prophecy was clouding his judgment, but now that he has accepted his fate he can make dissections without the fear of his destiny coming true. Now he pleads to move away, while at the beginning he denied he would ever hurt Thebes. The tragedy of his realizing he was not in control of his actions is what led him to self-growth. In an ironic way now that he is blind he can see the truth. In the final lines of the play, the Chorus is

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