Ok spoilers ahead.
But Oedipus Rex a.k.a. Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is almost 2,500 years old at this point so it’s fair game imo.
The Oedipus story in a nutshell:
Oedipus, who was secretly adopted, receives a prophecy that he will kill his dad. So to thwart fate he leaves his dad and winds up in a city with a missing king (btw killing an argumentative guy on the way). Many years after becoming the new king and marrying the widow, he discovers that the dude he long-ago killed on the road was the missing king. Uh oh. And that the missing king was actually his birth dad, prophecy fulfilled. Double uh oh. And that his now-wife is therefore his birth mom. Uh oh for the third time, wife/mom suicides, stabs out own eyes, exiles self. End.
So the Sophocles play is a re-telling of this already well-worn story, at a time when Athenian culture was oriented around annual drama competitions (it came second).
The narrative new spin on the old tale is that it’s told as a whodunnit set over a single day, sunrise to sunset.
In a combination of flashbacks and new action, Oedipus himself acts as detective solving the mystery of the old king’s murder.
We’re already well into Oedipus’ reign of Thebes at the moment of the play, so his arrival is all backstory, then it’s tragic revelation after tragic revelation as his investigations bear fruit, and–
Oedipus discovers the identity of the mysterious murderer, and it’s him.
What a twist!
I mean, this is “he was dead all along” levels of whoa, right?
So I’ve been trying to think of other whodunnits in which the detective finds out that they themselves are the killer.
I can only think of one and a half, plus one I’m not sure about?
SPOILERS
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So there’s Fight Club (1999) which, if you see it as a whodunnit in which the protagonist is trying to catch up with Tyler Durden, they discover that yes indeed etc
A clearer fit is Angel Heart (1987) in which Mickey Rourke plays PI Harry Angel who is commissioned by Robert De Niro to dig into a murder, and well you can guess who did it by my topic, and also it turns out that De Niro is the devil.
There is also Memento (2000), maybe, because ironically I can’t remember what happened.
You would have thought that detective-catching-up-with-their-quarry-and-it’s-them would be a common twist.
But yeah, 3.5 auto-whodunnits in 2.5 thousand years is not so many.
There must be more?
In literature:
I can’t think of any Agatha Christies that do this but admittedly I’ve not read too many.
There’s a sci-fi time-loop element to the auto-whodunnit - the investigating time traveller from the future turns out to be the instigator in the past - but although the concept feels tantalisingly familiar, no specific stories come to mind.
I enjoy a Straussian reading and I would like to dowse the hidden, esoteric meaning of Oedipus, Angel Heart and the rest. What is the meaning behind the story?
Freud has his famous interpretation of course but although I am taken with his take on Medusa I don’t think he goes deep enough with Oedipus.
BECAUSE:
My go-to razor for deciphering creative works is that all creative works are fundamentally about the act of creation (2017).
That’s true of Star Wars (the Force is narrative), Blade Runner (the replicants are actors), Hamlet (Shakespeare himself played the ghost), and in a follow-up post I added Groundhog Day (the experience of script iteration) and 1984 (the real omniscient Big Brother is the reader).
Many such cases, as they say.
I call it the Narcissist Creator Razor. They can’t help themselves, those creators, it’s all they know.
So I believe that Oedipus Tyrannus, the original auto-whodunnit, is the ur-exemplar of this razor: what Oedipus tells us is that we can search and search and search for the meaning of a story, and search some more, and ultimately what we’ll find is ourselves, searching.
(Even as an author, part of what you do is try to fully understand what you’re saying in your own creation, so both author and reader are engaged in working to interpret the work.)
i.e. when you interpret Oedipus, you learn that what Oedipus is really about is the act of trying to interpret what Oedipus is really about.
Which makes you want to stab your eyes out, perhaps.
Honestly I’m wasted in the technology world, I should be a philosopher working to understand the nature of reality working to understand itself over an overflowing ashtray in a smoke-filled cafe in 50s Paris.