Oedipus The King

Oedipus says goodbye to his daughters, Antigone and Ismene.

Oedipus is a painful play to read.  Not that it's poorly written or tedious or written in dense prose, but that it is a the proverbial train wreck you can't look away from (I'm going to stop saying "It's like a train wreck you can't look away from" and replace it with "It's like Oedipus The King").  That was the part of the point, the story of Oedipus was more well known to the Greeks than it is to us today (or Sigmund Freud).  Sophocles wanted his audience to mess with his audience, and he certainly succeeded.

Oedpius The King is the story of the fall of Oedpius.  Oedipus is the king of Thebes after he solved the Sphinx's riddle and the death of Thebe's previous king.  Thebes is under a new curse, attributed to the unsolved death of the previous king.  Oedipus promises to hunt the murderer down and banish the killer from Thebes.  Creon, Oedipus's right-hand man, brings a prophet who accuses Oedipus of killing the previous king.  Oedipus sends the prophet away in a fit of rage and a messenger from the court of Corinth arrives to inform Oedipus that his foster father has died.  His wife take the conversation with the Corinthian and figures out who killed the previous king.  Oedipus wife realizes that Oedipus has not only killed the previous king, but that he is the son she sent away after she delivered him.  She encourages Oedipus to stop his pursuit of the killer, but he refuses so she retreats to the castle.  Oedipus then questions a shepherd who was the only surviving member of the king's entourage when the king was murdered.  It is revealed that Oedipus is the murderer of the previous king, who was also his father and that his current wife is his birth mother.  His wife/mother has killed herself after realizing what has happened and Oedipus blinds and exiles himself in his despair over his wife/mother and his fate.

Like I said, this is painful to read because you know how it will end.  But you can't stop reading because you know it's going to end in disaster (and not just because it's a tragedy, but because of Oedipus's hubris which is a classic Greek theme).  The story is tragic, but it seeks to demonstrate you can't escape the fate the gods have set before you.  If you are destined to kill your father and sleep with your mother.  Your parents abandoning you to die on a hillside or fleeing from your supposed parents isn't going to stop you from fathering two sons (who will kill each other by the end of the trilogy) and two daughters (one of which will have killed herself by the end of the trilogy) who also happen to be your brothers and sisters.