Blog Post #2 - This stuff is confusing to think about!

When I finished reading Oedipus Rex it left me thinking about the answers to questions that don't really have answers.

I thought a lot about fate. How can you be responsible for your fate, if what you are going to do is already decided? I guess that your fate is already decided, but you reach that fate by your own choices, and maybe that is how you can be responsible for it because you do ultimately make those choices. But then I wonder if a higher power already knows exactly what choices you are going to make to reach that fate, so at that point you may not really be choosing to make those decisions? To me this is similar to the discussions I always had with my dad when I was younger. We would always talk about the idea of infinity or time being endless. It's interesting to think about, but the fact that we will never really understand it is very overwhelming... and that's how I felt when we finished reading Oedipus Rex and had our class discussions about fate.

Not only did I think about fate in the since of whether or not we are responsible for it, but it's also interesting (to me) to think about whether or not you can change your fate. And how sometimes the more you try to change your fate the closer you reach it. This happened in Oedipus Rex many times... like when he was leaving his village because he was trying to avoid killing is father, but on the way out he actually killed his father! And I also thought about this... the play is full of dramatic irony because we know what his fate is, and we can kind of laugh to ourselves sometimes because of the things that Oedipus said that we know are not true. So do the higher powers who know our ultimate fate watch us and laugh at us? Becase if you think about it they know our fate so a lot of our lives could be dramatic irony? Haha, it's kinda of a quirky thought but I thought it was interesting.

Other than these questions and ideas that I had, I honestly left with kind of grossed out pesamistic thoughts and images -- I mean, the whole end of the play was filled with them. The fact that Oedipus's children are his siblings, incest in general, Iocaste hanging herself, and Oedipus stabbing his eyes out!! UGH!! Gross is all I have to say to that.