Embrace Fate

When I was a little girl, I absolutely adored Sesame Street. Within my large collection of Sesame Street paraphernalia was a book titled The Monster at the End of This Book and it featured the blue, furry monster that was actually Grover instead of another famous blue monster who had a soft spot for cookies. I remember curiosity always getting the best of me and finally reaching the end of the book only to find that the monster was just “little ol'” Grover. Although it was a children's book, it had a message that was applicable to everyone. Do not fear fate because of it's sheer inevitability. Instead, fate should be embraced. There are instances in reality where some aspects of life are completely out of man's control and, despite our greatest efforts to contravene this tacit law, are bound to occur. Due to the fact that we never truly acknowledge this truth, literature has the responsibility of reflecting this fact of life to the world. Luckily, we had authors like Sophocles, who wrote Oedipus the King, and Gabriel García Márquez, and his novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, that reminded us of the futility in going against fate.

Fate, in both reality and literature, is viewed as something that can not be rectified or remedied through any type of action. When Gregor Samsa turned into that humongous beetle, Kafka made it clear that, with no remedy in sight, he was destined to be in this form. Both Sophocles' and Márquez's books also discuss fate but in different ways. Although both books were very tragic in the way they ended, Sophocles' Oedipus the King approached the topic of fate in a way that lacked much suspense. The audiences would have already known the story of Oedipus and his destiny that included murdering his fathe...

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... truth that eventually destroyed him instead of leaving things be as they were; these actions came to manifest by his own free will. In contrast, Márquez actually did include free will in Chronicle of a Death Foretold but in a way that was detrimental to Santiago Nasar. Instead of going down the honorable route and making the characters act, Márquez chose to make characters that chose to be inactive, out of their own free will. Márquez, by deciding to make some of his characters intentionally choose to not act due to their own afflictions or simply because of their mistakes while in action, may have thought that free will was predetermined and an aspect of fate as a whole. Márquez and, similarly, Sophocles were saying that it would not matter what we did or, in the case of Santiago Nasar, what we did not do would not affect fate at all, whether positive or negative.