Oedipus and inevitability

I read Oedipus Rex today for my Theater Appreciation class. In the textbook's introduction, I learned about two aspects of the theater experience that are prevalent in this play: discovery and reversal of fortune. I thought long over these aspects and how I could see them in so many places today, in books, television, movies, etc. If things are just linear, it would be quite boring to say the least. There need to be questions, mysteries; and there also need to be turn-arounds that make us forfeit hasty judgments. I'm going to keep these two things in mind whilst working on this musical I've been going at on and off for about a year or so.

As far as the play is concerned, I would quickly have some beef with some of its themes. The play's theme of inevitability is fair enough in my book. The way I see it, not a single atom moves, not a single neuron in your brain fires, not a single ray of light shines, without there being a reason for its shining, cause and effect. It's in this way that all things are inevitable, at least it seems to be so in principle. But who can know this? In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles seems to say the gods have knowledge of this inevitability and regardless of how hard man may try, he cannot escape this inevitability. I think this is probably usually the case, but I think that in man exists the potential to rise above all the elements, that in his universe-given freedom and awareness, he can make choices that not a single soul, save the universe itself, could foresee. The laws and the gods in place would be necessary for such a man to liberate himself from all things that would try to control him, to turn him away from believing in himself, in his existence that came into being for a reason. And so I sensed a bit of fear-mongering in this play which didn't exactly turn me off from it. It was still quite a moving experience from beginning to end, and that in itself is a great thing. Seeing as how most of that culture lived in fear-induced reverence to the gods, it's not particularly surprising that it's so prevalent in the play, with or without direct intention from Sophocles.