Oriental culture worships a higher Being who dictates the course of our life. Each person follows a path that is called Fate and encountered different events that is predetermined. Often people practice fortune-telling and foresee a rough patch ahead and try to perform rituals or conjure up spirits to smooth out the future. No one knows or is able to confirm the effectiveness of those rituals, which in turn put us in a state of confusion, uncertainty, and sometimes impotence to prevent what is to come. Ancient greek plays were written under the same impression that the fate of the characters are predetermined by the Gods, who played them as if on a chess board. Sophocles’ “Antigone” is an exemple of such belief.
“Antigone” is the sequel of the play “Oedipus Rex,” that was written with a twist away from the Oedipus Rex’s storyline. The idea of Fate was prevalent in “Oedipus Rex” as the King Oedipus was predicted to kill his father and marry his mother. Indeed he did, but he only finds out the truth because he had tried to espace his Fate. This shows that the more you run away from Fate, the sooner you fulfilled your Destiny. In “Antigone,” The Chorus seems like a representative of Fate, narrating the characters’ thoughts: their roles, already predestined, should be self-evident, even if the reason they come to doom is ultimately not. Thus the Chorus traces each character’s fate. Antigone cannot help but to bury her perished brother and die because of her own actions; Creon is the unwilling king after the death of the brothers; Eurydice’s role is but to die in her room. Yet Creon tries to resist Polynices’ fate to be buried properly not only to fail miserably but also to lose his own son Haemon.
In short, “Antigone” is a representation of the ultimacy of Fate. The Gods are not to be defied and when they are, the consequences are predetermined and unfathomable. The fall of the characters are partly brought by their own attempts to resist Fate but in fact their fall had been determined even before the beginning of the play.
