Oedipus the Aberrant By: Kristen Bradish

As many of us learned in English class, Oedipus was a young king who bolted from his kingdom to escape his fate. Considering that his fate proclaimed he would kill his own father, it seemingly wasn't in good judgment that he stumbled into a fork in the road and killed a gathering of men. It appeared as if he was willing to slay an entire group of travelers without thinking too much of it but yet fled his kingdom just because he could perchance kill his father one day. If he was running away so he didn't have to kill his father, why would he annihilate these unfamiliar men when he wasn't completely certain Polybus was his real dad? Oedipus had suspicions that he wasn't their real son, so he should have known he was at risk of killing another man that could have been his biological father.
We all meet people that have us asking ourselves how it's possible for them to possess such little common sense. Oedipus is one of those people. He had total disregard for the consequences of his actions. After he overcame the beast terrorizing Thebes and won the throne, Oedipus didn't seem to realize that King Laius had been announced dead right around the time he killed all those gentlemen on the road. It is not till years later when he suddenly wants to find the killer that he strings together he is responsible for the murder. Jocasta and he pretend to not recognize the truth but the audience can see right through their act. At this point, everyone knows that he was the one who killed Laius, his father, in an attempt to flee his from his troubled future. Defeating Laius also led to him marrying his mother and producing several offspring.
If only he had dug deeper into finding out who his real parents were, maybe this whole thing could have been avoided. He never once thought to bring up his uncontrollable destiny to his wife. Oedipus followed blindly into his fathers' footsteps, who also proceeded to take his fate into his own hands and lost to destiny. No one would want to admit that fate is out of their hands. Humans want their choices to reflect the consequence, but in Oedipus The King, they had no such luck.
Too often a character goes looking for the truth, finds a shard or scrap of mediocre evidence, and goes running with it even though they don't have the whole picture. Oedipus didn't stop to question his guardians if they truly were his parents and he never even thought to share this destiny with them. If they knew about it, his fate could have changed because staying home with his parents who knew about the prophecy would be a lot less risky than leaving and having the possibility of running into his biological parents whom he was not acquainted with. No matter what he did, it was as if the Gods had an animosity against him and wouldn't let the fellow escape their wrath.