Do We Really Have a Chance?

During our discussion of Oedipus the King, I think that our class had a great discussion but did not seem to see what I saw when it came to question number 7. What initially struck me was the fact that other people in the class did believe that Oedipus had a chance but as soon as he realized where he ‘went wrong’, he was led to his doom. I began to notice that some people actually believed that because he knew the oracle, he should have had a chance to change it and ultimately was in the wrong for killing his father and laying with his mother because he had the opportunity to avoid it. After further analysis of my personal opinion and what occurred in the play, I have come to completely disagree with those conclusions. There is no way that Oedipus had a chance, even if he had tried to avoid the correct pair of parents. I think that it comes along with a question that the play raises which is, do we control our own fate? Since I believe that we do have some control over our own fate, I also believe that no one ultimately has a chance in this world. I believe that because no matter what we choose to do, bad things will always happen to everyone throughout their life. This is not to say that good things will not happen also, but those good things will not make up nor stop the bad. These bad things are what gives us no chance, because we have no foresight into what is to come and thus we cannot stop the bad things from happening. If there was a higher power completely controlling our fate, then there would be people who exist who never would experience a bad thing in their life. Since I do not believe that there is a higher power that completely controls our fate, no one should be considered to have gone wrong when bad things happen as we have no way of controlling how our decisions ultimately play out. A clear example that presents this concept is in the movie Run Lola Run. During the movie, there are three possible scenarios shown of how everything could work out. Despite each scenario being completely different, Mr. Meyer gets into some form of a car accident every single time. It is inferred that this was ultimately Mr. Meyer’s fate, and no matter what he did differently each time, he did not have a chance.