Lyric Essay

 Kennedy Singleton 

10/12/20

Feldkamp 5 

FOLLOWING THE BREADCRUMBS OF FATE

“Hansel and Gretel” is a well known Grimm children's fable that shows the dangers of trusting strangers, as well as many other weird life lessons like do not eat houses made out of candy. You might be wondering, what in the world do “Hansel and Gretel” have to do with fate? While the story itself has nothing to do with fate, the use of breadcrumbs to lure parties to their unfortunate demise are a perfect analogy for the claim that I am making today. 

Oedipus, contrary to what I attempted to debate in class, was a victim of fate in the form of a prophecy. Fate is what paved the path that Oedipus followed, but the thing that drove Oedipus was the fact that he had knowledge of the prophecy and what it entailed, sparking him to follow the breadcrumb trail that fate had set out. This common theme, fate sparking into action once the character that it is about becomes aware of its existence, can be found in several books and movies from Shakespeare’s time all the way to the 21st century. One example of this can be found in the popular book series Harry Potter. 

Harry Potter, despite being a children’s book series, manages to tackle the complicated inner workings of fate and prophecies, in between magic wizard battles, three-headed dogs, and awkward teen romance. For readers who might not be aware of the use of prophecies in Harry Potter, here is a video explaining it, but I will also give the paraphrased version of it. The Dark Lord, better known as Voldemort or He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, was told of a prophecy that a baby born in July would grow up to defeat him, that child being either Harry Potter or Neville Longbottom. This prophecy was told by a teacher interviewing to work for Hogwarts, Professor Trelawney, to Professor and Headmaster Albus Dumbledore. The prophecy was assumed to be about Harry Potter, as he came from well known and powerful wizard parents, but it could have also equally fit Neville Longbottom. The sheer knowledge of that prophecy caused Voldemort to attempt to kill Harry, which in turn injured him and caused him to lose an enormous amount of power and influence, making him easier to defeat in the end. This action chose Harry Potter as the fulfiller of the prophecy and set the entire story into motion. Harry himself does not find out about the existence of the prophecy until many years later in the Ministry on Magic in the form of a crystal ball. 

Similar to Oedipus parents, Voldemort tried to stop the prophecy from being able to occur in the first place, and instead actually set the prophecy in motion. It leads the characters to follow the slowly forming breadcrumb trail that leads to the end prophecy occurring. One might argue that this means that attempting to go against fate causes it to happen, but I see it as the knowledge of the prophecy causes it to go into motion. It is first instinct to try to stop a bad prophecy from happening, we cannot fault the characters for doing that. But finding out about the prophecy in the first place causes them to go against it, which causes them to start the descent to being doomed. 

Prophecies and fate are not only found in works of literary fiction, but also in religious texts. In the Bible, Jesus’ death is phropesized by himself, and the knowledge that he is going to die causes him to be more daring with his miracles and actions, because he knew that he was going to be killed anyway. While this is a huge jump in differentiations in text, I mean I know going from Harry Potter to the Bible is a pretty big leap, but this complete switch just urges to show that this thought, this idea of prophecies and fate, can be found all throughout different kinds of literature. 

What I’m trying to say is that prophecies are set off by the acknowledgement that they exist. We can see this with Oedipus, Harry Potter, and the Bible. Aristotle comments “the events of the plot may follow one after another either inevitably or with probability” in his words on tragic character. These tragic characters (Oedipus, Harry Potter, and Jesus Christ) all had a plot that was followed through with the single starting point of knowing about their fate and prophecy, and then all of the pieces fall into place after that.