In Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Oedipus, the protagonist, meets a savagely ironic end at the conclusion of the play. In the beginning, Oedipus seems like a great, majestic hero. Although he has a very obnoxious and conceited attitude, he did save Thebes, and he is the king. While he is not a likable character due to his general attitude, he commands respect because he is a man of action and a man of honor. I came to appreciate how much he cares about Thebes. When he was told what Apollo had declared about the plague, he immediately sent a messenger to the prophet Tiresias, and when he heard of the shepherd who had answers, he immediately sent for him. He also immediately started calling down curses on the culprit of the murder of King Laius because he thought it would save his people. Interestingly, they are not even his people by blood, because he is a foreigner. During his stay in Thebes, re rose up from a runaway from Corinth to the king of Thebes. This made his fall incredibly harsh because the bigger they are, the harder they fall. It is extremely ironic that the killer and the cause of the deathly plague was him. He was supposed to be the champion of Thebes, but instead turned out to be quite the opposite. All his hatred towards the criminal that murdered Laius turned inward and he destroyed himself. In the end, he became the very person he sought to bring to justice.