Fate or Chance?

There are two ways to view the future with regards to one’s life. One of these ways is fate, the belief that the events that comprise one’s life are predetermined and can occur in only one way. The other way is chance, the belief that one can control the events in their life through choice as they encounter them. This concept of fate versus chance was one that fascinated the ancient Greeks. They believed strongly in fate over chance, and the three Moirae (fates), Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, controlled the lives of all humans on Earth through metaphorical threads. Staying true to his Greek beliefs, Sophocles depicts the triumph of fate over chance in his play Oedipus the King.

Oedipus recounts that at the shrine at Delphi the priestess “prophesied that [he] should kill Polybos, / Kill [his] own father,” and marry and sleep with his mother. Try as he might to evade this prophecy, Oedipus cannot. It was he who killed his father and Oedipus did in fact marry his own mother. In the play, all who believe in chance and reject fate are ruined. Oedipus carries out his horrid fate unbeknownst to him and blinds himself in the end. Iocastê, Oedipus’s wife and mother who regards all prophets as phonies, is married to her own son and takes her own life. According to Greek beliefs, as demonstrated in Sophocles’s play, any attempt to escape one’s fate is futile.

Perhaps the real reason why the concept of fate versus chance is so controversial is because neither one can be ruled out as being entirely incorrect by simple logic, and they can both be considered correct given different viewpoints. For example, say I walk into a 7-Eleven and decide to buy a soda. I can buy a Coke, a Sprite, or a Fanta. Chance: I choose to buy a Coke. Fate: However, in the end, I did choose a Coke, and not a Sprite or a Fanta; the event could only take place in one specific way. And thus we are left with the same dilemma faced by the ancient Greeks. If neither fate nor chance appear to be entirely incorrect, which one in fact exists? The ancient Greeks answered this question in the same manner we humans answer most questions we cannot answer: they created a higher being, the Moirae.

The way I perceive it, fate and chance are just two different vantage points from which to look at the events in our lives. From the chance vantage point, we have the ability to make decisions entirely out of our own free will, and thus we have the ability to control our own lives. However, from the fate vantage point, in the end the events in our lives can and will turn out in only one specific way. (472)

Shock and Wasted Life in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych deals with the slow realization of a dying man that he has essentially wasted his life, and want and he may, he will never get another chance to live it. The story’s second chapter begins, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” While for some this first sentence may have created some literary tension, or even oxymoron, it did not faze me at all, and I in fact passed over it without notice until it was brought up in class discussion. This sentence did not faze me because it made complete sense to me. Whether or not you believe in an afterlife, you only get one chance at life itself, and aside from living a corrupt and evil life, nothing could be more terrible than a simple and ordinary one.

I went to sleep immediately after reading the first two chapters of Tolstoy’s story the other night and I had a dream. I had a dream that I was dying; I was dying at seventeen years old. All I could think about was that I was too young to die. Statistically speaking, I’ve probably already lived somewhere between one-fourth and one-fifth of my life, but what bothered me in my dream was knowing that I would die without doing so many of the things I’ve wanted to do with my life.

Perhaps Ilych felt the same way as he lay on his deathbed. He had lived his entire life after childhood by his own golden rule of doing whatever others (society) thought to be appropriate, and repressing his desires to do what he wanted to do. Although Ilych may not have become consciously aware that he had “not spent his life as he should have done” until mere days before his death, this knowledge of his wasted life may have been in his subconscious for quite some time. Ilych groaned, and in the end screamed, in agony as he slowly died, and it is mentioned many times in the story that Ilych’s agony was more of a mental nature than a physical one. It would seem the most logical explanation for this mental agony is that Ilych could sense something disturbingly wrong, more than just the fear of death, even if he did not know what this wrong was at the time.

This wrong is the fear of a wasted life, which lay in Ilych’s subconscious until he became aware of it in his final days, as evidenced simply by his rejection of his impulses to do what he wanted if these impulses went against society’s standards. Perhaps during your life you have experience the shock of driving down a road in the wrong direction for a couple of hours, or losing a term paper when your computer crashed, because you knew (all at once) that you had “wasted” that short bit of your life. Essentially, this shock is the same one that Ilych is dealing with on a grand scale, realizing all at once that he has wasted his entire life, and that he would have no chance to live again. And it is this shock that sent him into screaming “so terrible that one could not hear it through two closed doors without horror.” (562)