Greek Mythology Themes in Brother, Betrayed

The story of Macbeth and the Weird Sisters was an inspiration for me while writing Brother, Betrayed. The Weird Sisters are also known as The Fates, The Norns, The Sisters of Fate, The Three Witches or Moirae.



In Brother, Betrayed the three main characters meet a blind woman that resembles the witches that Macbeth meets in his tragedy.

“Please, sit with us by the fire,” she said and looked up at them. Their breath stopped at her eyes, the color of fog at dusk, seeming to glow in the faint light of the fire. Even the pupils, which should have been black and deep, were a film of gray, and the brothers wondered how well she could see them.

Encouraged, yet embarrassed, the brothers glanced at each other. They moved to sit before the woman, whose eyes followed them. Now they could study her face: the bones of it were meagerly covered with thin, aged skin, like a snake that should have shed cycles ago. Her face was human, they noted, but somehow she still seemed a trespasser. Her lips moved a little as if she were speaking, but she was silent. Looking down, they saw her hands kept moving restlessly on her lap, even after she stopped threading the needle through the pieces of cloth.

Another theme of Greek tragedy is the realization of fatal flaws and mistakes one has overlooked. In the story of Oedipus, the fates prophesize that he will murder his father - and Oedipus gouges out his eyes after he discovers he made this prophecy come true.




In Brother, Betrayed, the brothers' fatal flaws are not revealed until the end of the book, when disaster falls on them and their kingdom.