Oedipus The King Fate Vs Free Will Essay

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Fate is the development of events beyond a person’s control, it is destined to happen, and free will is the ability to act at one’s own will, you can voluntarily choose what happens in your life. To me, being able to do whatever I want without fate getting in my way is incredible, people seem happier when they can practice their own free will, rather than being told what is going to happen in their lives and being forced to do so. However, the ancient Greeks believed that your free will was based on your personality and that fate was a basic part of life. Every aspect of an ancient Greeks life was dependent on fate. Fate and free will meant so much to the characters in Oedipus The King.
The fate in the play is Oedipus getting saved after being left to die to escape his destiny, Oedipus meeting and killing his father, unknowingly, and him marrying his own mother. “With my father’s blood upon me! Never to have been the man they call his mother’s husband! Oh accurst! Oh child of evil, to have entered that wretched bed. An example of free will in the play is when Oedipus stabs his eyes out with his wife/mother’s jewelry, “for the king ripped from her gown the golden brooches that were her ornament, and raised them, and plunged them down straight into his own eyeballs, crying…” He took his own sight away so he no longer had to see the horrors that have been going on around him, he did not want to see his parents in the afterlife, and he would not be able to bear the sight of them. Oedipus’s destiny was made up of his own personal decisions and forced events, although I believe fate won against free will in the metaphorical fight during the play, his fate controlled most of his life rather than his free will, to me he only did a couple of things that would be counted as personal life decisions, rather than the multiple events that were caused by fate. Iocasta loses everything because of Oedipus’s fate, she lost both of her husbands, her son, her family, and her reputation, her coping method was suicide, and it was all because of the Oracle of Delphi and Oedipus’s fate. By choosing to end her own life, Iocasta exercised her free will, it never said in her fate that she must kill herself, she committed suicide to escape from all of the chaos. To me, the thing that is most disruptive is the Oracle of Delphi and the events that developed after the king and queen tried to stop it from happening. Oedipus marrying his own mother and having children with her was definitely very disturbing to read. And honestly, being a helpless victim of fate is definitely scarier than exercising my free will and
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He wants to help his people and his city of Thebes. And even though he got a little frustrated during the process, he still did what he said and banished the killer, which was himself, from his own city, and that makes him a hero. His loyalty and faith that he dedicated to Thebes makes him so admirable. He is not just a hero, but a tragic hero, he has tragic flaws as well, which is his pride that got in the way when he was trying to discover the

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