Man, I know that the majority of the "why didn't Oedipus do xyz thing instead" are mostly jokes, but god the angry tragedy enjoyer part of me always just wants to grab and shake the people saying that.
Because the entire fucking point is that he could not have escaped that fate. He, regardless of what he fucking did, was always going to kill his father and marry his mother. No suggestion would stand up to that, because the *point* of the story of Oedipus was that the only way for him to not have committed those heinous acts was for him to not to have been born! And then! And *then* where the tragedy gets truly delicious, is that the part he did have control over, the finding out, was always going to happen too, because of who Oedipus was fundamentally as a character. For him to not make the decision to keep digging, he would have had to either be a different character, or go through such a major character arc the he would be unrecognizable as the Oedipus we know!
Just. The inevitability is the point! The inability to escape fate is the point! The trying so desperately to only to realize you have been trapped by your character, by things so far beyond your control you can barely fathom them is the point!
