Sophocles is sending the message, whatever is destined to happen will happen.
             There is no getting around it. There is nothing you can do to prevent that which has been
             ordained by the gods. After all, they are immortal and we are mortal.
             In the other books we read this course this theme is prevalent. In the Odyssey, it is
             Odysseus's fate to return home after 10 years of war and ten years of wandering. He has many
             brushes with death, he lost his entire crew, and his ship but he is still destined to get home. When
             we were reading the Metamorphoses I remember making the statement "If the goddess's fall in
             love with you, your doomed". There was no way of evading their advances. You can run away
             from fate, but you can not evade it forever.
             Sophocles takes fate to a different level. He shows the futility of trying to alter fate. This
             fact is clearly understood in this story. At his birth it was ordained that Oedipus would kill his
             father and marry his mother. The oracle of Apollo declared the omen, and that's all there was to
             it. Surely Oedipus, a new born baby was totally innocent. At this point it was nothing that
             Oedipus had done to justify such a tragedy. However that is what fate is. His parents, King Lauis
             and Queen Jocasta tryed to stop the prophecy from coming to past. What could they do?
             They didn't want to kill the baby. How could any sane person kill their own child. If they
             committed that act, and took the child's life, do you think this would have prevented the
             They sought an alternate solution to thwart the gods. Oedipus's feet was rivetted and he
             was abandoned at a mountainside and left to die. Fate rears its head again, or shall I say the gods
             intervened: the shepherd disregard his instructions to abandon the baby. He gives the child to
             ...