The Superstition He Fell for in the Sophocles by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald
“How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be. When there's no help in truth!” (17) Knowing the truth, Oedipus thought he could abstain of killing his father and marrying his mother but it did not help him at all since his life was determined the day he was born. Oedipus’s life was a written nightmare, and not matter what choices he made, he was destined to suffer. Throughout the play, Oedipus get broken from fate and trying to escape it but it was pointless. At the end, he lost all hope because no matter what he did, the prophecy laid out for him kept coming true.
To begin with the play Oedipus Rex, one needs to understand that fate plays a major role in it.
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He probably thought the his life was set and have won his fight against his fate; however, the more he tried to control his fate, the more it controlled him. After becoming a king, his people came and asked him to save them from “the god of the plague” (4). Seeing how his city was being cursed by the Gods for not finding the killer, he thought he had an obligations to help his people and pleased the Gods. Despite the “game” that Gods might have been playing with Oedipus’s life, he wanted to do what was right for his people and to find the killer of the former king. He was a honest man and he was only trying to find the truth, but it did not matter, Oedipus was the only who was devastating at the end. In the hope of saving the city and finding the truth, Oedipus found the shepherd who was supposed kill “Laios's child”(63) because “it was said that the boy would kill his own father”(64). It was in that moment when Oedipus realized he was fool for thinking he could cheat his fate and lived happy ever after. He wasted his life of trying to change it and yet fate caught with him. As a tragic hero, he was never supposed be happy. The play clear showed that a man’s fate appears to be more important than his freewill. Oedipus try to defy fate. In the play, fate is more powerful and lead him to make the prophecy come true. He ended up killing Laius, whom he did not know it was his father or that king at that time, and he became the new king of Thebes; therefore, he assumed the role of the new husband of Jocasta, his