The idea of fate has baffled mankind for centuries. Can humans control what happens to them, or is everyone placed in a predestined world designed by a higher power? The Epic of Gilgamesh and Oedipus The King highlight on the notion that no matter what, people cannot control what is destined to occur. Interestingly enough, many other distantly connected cultures had, and have similar gods or goddesses who play a role in the fate of individuals. Oedipus, King of Thebes, was told by the Oracle at Delphi that he would one day kill his father and marry his mother. Determined not to let this prophecy verify his fears, Oedipus does all in his power to prevent this from happening, yet fails. Similarly, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, attempts to obtain immortality, but fails as well. Gilgamesh's and Oedipus's intense fear and ignorance cause them to try to interfere with their fates, leading to their failures and realization of the futility of trying to control destiny. The characters Oedipus and Gilgamesh are very similar in that they both are fearful of their fates. After the death of his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh is distraught with worry, asking, "shall I too not lie down like him./And never get up forever and ever?"("The Epic of Gilgamesh" 76). The prospect of laying forever in a grave is not appealing to Gilgamesh. He dreads it so much that he tries to prevent his inevitable fate from happening. Seeing his friend die and rot away has scared Gilgamesh beyond belief. He cannot bear to think of himself being lost forever, not remembered by anyone. Likewise, Oedipus is afraid to fulfill his prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, making him a sinner not fit to rule his kingdom. He knows that if he commits this horri...
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...s made a mistake and "this sudden illumination (or epiphany) assures us that order and purpose do exist in the universe, even if we cannot fathom the exact nature of that order and purpose"(Markos 39). The world may never know if we have power to control our ultimate destinies or not. However, it is clear in Oedipus the King and The Epic of Gilgamesh that free will does not exist. Oedipus and Gilgamesh are puppets being controlled by the gods above, helpless to exercise free will. No matter what course they take, Oedipus cannot escape from killing his father and marry his mother and Gilgamesh cannot escape death. Nevertheless, their fears cause them to try to manipulate their actions and stop their fates from occurring. It is only a matter of time before these two characters fail in their attempts and realize that trying to control destiny is futile.
Gilgamesh and Odysseus are two heroes from two different time periods that were both in search of the meaning of life. The epics that the two characters are featured in Gilgamesh, was developed from early Mesopotamia and the Odyssey in early Greece. Gilgamesh was a very popular and it was very valuable to the historian of Mesopotamian culture because it reveals much about the religious world, such as their attitudes toward the gods, how a hero was defined and regarded, views about death and friendship.
Giligamesh and Oedipus don’t look the same or think the same, but the two of them are very similar in many ways. Both heroes can be seen as brave individuals, but as I read both passages my opinion is that Giligamesh was a braver and more heroic character. Giligamesh always seemed to push himself to the extreme and always could be found in a dangerous situation. Unfortunately both of these characters are extremely cocky and self righteous. In the began of the epic poem the reader may notice that Giligamesh is a very authoritative and overbearing ruler, he looks highly on himself and is seen as an unfair King. However the reader may see the opposite happen in Oedipus Rex, it is very noticeable that Oedipus goes from starting off as a good person who’s intentions are well change to a tyrannical leader who lets his hubris attitude take over. Another similarity found in both passages is the fact that both have tragic outcomes. Oedipus’s outcome is way more worse, then Giligamesh’s outcome, since Oedipus ends up having children with his mother and he kills his own father. Although both works share many similarities, they have just as many differences. The main difference is that an epic hero, like Giligamesh, makes the journey and success throughout the story, where in a tragic hero, like Oedipus, doesn’t success and tries to run from his problems. Another difference is that Giligamesh didnt have a tragic flaw were Oedipus did. Also one writing was about a person who was a victim of there own fate were the other writing was about a person enteral responsibility for his own sake and
won) fighting a war against the city of Troy and has been held captive by
With most pieces of literature that has a king involved, there tends to be two kinds of kings – ones that care about the well being of their people and their city, and ones that show their dominance over his people every chance they get. The two primary examples kings that will be contrasting each other, one being compassionate and the other being reckless, are Oedipus from “Oedipus the King”, and Gilgamesh from “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Oedipus and Gilgamesh contrast each other by the way they treat their people, with Oedipus being more empathetic and Gilgamesh being more ruthless.
A detective story is a genre of fiction in which a person attempts to solve a crime. The detective may be a professional or an amateur, and generally has nothing to gain from solving the crime. However in Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King”, the main character Oedipus is not only determined to solve a crime, but he is also in pursuit to find his own identity. This is similar to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” where Sherlock Holmes has been hired to work as a detective in return for monetary compensation. Both situations enable Oedipus and Sherlock to gain from unraveling the mysteries that sweep their towns hence making these stories different from most detective stories.
Every culture has a different story of their origin. Each story varies in setting, main characters, and religious aspects. Although the stories are different, the sole purpose is the same for each – to explain how each civilization came to be. In order for a civilization to fully understand their past, they must critically break down the components of their origin story. Creation stories establish appropriate relationships within society by the revelation of the punishment laid out by the gods on unsatisfactory vassals, the importance of a hero figure, and the exposure of human survival based on nature.
Since the beginning of time epic tales have been passed on from generation to generation as a form of entertainment. Even though each epic is different in its plot, every epic has certain features in common. The prime example of their similarities is their main character, the hero of the epic. The hero's behavior changes from the beginning to the end of the tale. Since the plot revolves around the epic hero, in most cases, they are made to seem God-like, or larger then life, in their capabilities and strengths. The hero constantly has to conquer major obstacles to achieve their initial and final goal. Usually the hero is tremendously suspicious of other characters intensions. Also, this character usually demonstrates examples of hubris throughout the tale, which ultimately makes his journey more difficult. The epic heroes differences vary but in the epic tale, The Odyssey written by Homer, and the Greek drama, Oedipus The King written by Sophocles, the differences is what makes Oedipus fail and Odysseus succeed. In both these tales, the powerful gods enormously affect their decisions and the consequences they eventually have to face.
One of the most important questions that society has been asking since the ancient times is to what extent man rules over his own destiny. For some people, destiny is entirely a matter of choice—that the purpose of and events in life are the consequences of conscious decisions. On the other hand, some people assert that destiny is preordained, which means that the events in life are inevitable and hence man is essentially powerless to stop them. Like many other questions relating to life, human control over destiny has found its way into becoming themes in great works of literature. Two of these works are Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, written in the 5th century B.C., and Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno, which comes from his greater work, The Divine Comedy, published in the 14th century A.D. Apart from being separated by many centuries, these two works offer differing views on the question of destiny. Whereas Oedipus Rex advances the predetermined and therefore inevitable nature of destiny, Inferno asserts that destiny is a matter of choice.
In Oedipus at Colonus, everyone seeks to gain Oedipus’s hero cult and the subsequent blessing for their city. Although this would not help them live forever, they did not care since it would help their cities live on. Since the cities are put first, those who helped them are immortalized through them; however, suffering was often required before an individual learned to put the city first. For instance, Oedipus does not put the good of the city first when Teiresias tells him he is the killer of Laius. Rather than save the city then, he stays because he believes “ I must be ruler.” (101). Only after suffering through the tragedies in the latter half of the play, does he learn to put the city’s needs above his desire to rule. This high valuation of group goals over personal desires, led to the Greeks desiring immortality for the city rather than the individual. Although Oedipus does eventually gains a form of immortality, it is only by helping Athens with his hero cult. Even then, the immortality he gains is much different than Gilgamesh’s personal immortality. Although the kings of Athens would remember him, no one else would even know where he was buried. Like the Greeks Oedipus did not seek to gain immortality for himself, but for his
Set ages apart, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex provide different perspectives on the topic of tragedy and what is defined as a tragic hero. Although Oedipus would be thought of as better representing the tragic hero archetype due to tradition and time period, the modern tragic hero of Oedipus Rex is more of a dismal one. Through analysis of their respective hamartias, it is exemplified that the New York businessman with his humble story proves to be more thought provoking than the King of Thebes and his melancholic tale. **By incorporating a more relatable character and plot, Arthur Miller lends help to making Willy Lowman spiral toward his own downfall while building more emotion and response from the audience than with Oedipus. When Oedipus learns of his awful actions, this invokes shock and desperation. With Willy Lowman, the audience goes for a bumpy ride until the eventual, but expected, crash. ** (NEEDS WORK)
A common debate that still rages today is whether we as a species have free will or if some divine source, some call it fate, controls our destiny. The same debate applies to Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Does Oedipus control his actions, or are they predetermined by the gods? It’s that question that makes Oedipus a classic, and many different people think many different things.
N.K. Sandars, is a story about a classic hero named Gilgamesh. Sandars shows how Gilgamesh goes through the three stages of departure, initiation, and the return. For example, according to an American mythologist named Joseph Campbell, “A hero is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself, or other than himself.” Throughout these three stages, Gilgamesh fights his way through many different obstacles, learns new things about himself, and makes new unexpected friends to make a name for himself.
In the stories/plays and poems of Gilgamesh, Oedipus the King and Achilles in the Iliad, there are three main heroes who have their fate decided for them by the Gods. Each hero has had fate placed on them according to the god’s, however as fate is understood there is also the idea of free will. Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third man, who feels as though he has no equal, Gilgamesh feels superior to all men until he meets Enkidu, a creation sent to stop Gilgamesh from his reckless and wild ways. Oedipus is the king of Thebes and his fate was prophecies by the blind soothsayer Tiresias in which he was to kill his father and marry his mother. In the poem the Iliad, Achilles was the hero that would win the war with Troy, the prophet Calchas predicted that Achilles would die at an early age. In all of the epics, each character had a destiny to full filled, blessed with extra ordinary powers and abilities, each had the a...
Although both The Iliad and Oedipus the King portray humans with very little control of their lives, in The Iliad the gods have some of the control, but are subservient to the power of fate and their biggest role in the story is to be an object of blame. This is contrasted by the view of power in Oedipus the king where the gods are much more involved and help carry out the Fates’ will, despite the human’s wishes, and this difference affects the thematic differences because Homer places more of the blame on humans while Sophocles gives humans less power and therefore less responsibility for their actions.
When Oedipus realizes what his future holds he decides to avoid it at all costs. As a result, he picked up and ran away. He decided not to tell his parents he was leaving so that he could avoid hurting their feelings. When he was on his journey to Thebes there were people coming towards him and they got in an upset about who had the right of way where three roads crossed. He ended up killing all but one of the men there. This is where Sophocles proves that you can never run from your fate. Even Jocasta accounts for this happening, “That it was fate that he should die a victim at the hands of his own son, a son to be born to Laius and me. But now, he the king was killed by a foreign highway robber at the place were three roads meet-so goes the story” (1.1.791-796). The man he killed in that street was actually his dad.