In Oedipus the King, there are many factors of dramatic irony that make the audience of the play, and the characters in the play act in a certain way towards themselves. This can cause many different emotions to be shown as well as changing the whole plot of the play completely.

Some examples of dramatic irony in the play are:

Page 7: There is a discussion on this page about someone being killed (Laius) whom Oedipus does not know and does not know where he was killed. In fact, Oedipus does know him because he killed him and therefore he knows where he died but again, he does not know what Laius looks like.

Page 14: On this page, Oedipus curses the killer of Laius in order to try to get them to confess so they can kill him. He is doing this because he wants to get rid of the plague in the city of Thebes. Of course the dramatic irony part of this is that Oedipus killed Laius and is therefore cursing and ultimately killing himself.

Page 25: Tiresias tells Oedipus that he is being intimate with someone he loves and that he does not truly know who that person is. Of course Oedipus does not believe this and he calls Tiresias a fool after Tiresias tells Oedipus that he has different parents than the ones he knows (page 29).

Pages 34-35: Oedipus accuses Creon of coming up with a plan to try to get his seat to be king. As we can see, Oedipus still does not believe in what Tiresias told him and he has come to this conclusion.

Pages 51-54: On these pages, some of the dramatic irony stops when Oedipus finds out that he really did kill Laius. He started to realize this when he had heard something Jocasta said.

Page 93: This is the page where Oedipus spears his eyes because he realizes the rest of the dramatic irony that we saw. He knew then that he had other parents (Laius and Jocasta) and therefore had children with his mother.

All of these examples show how Oedipus gets affected by tragedy in the play, how we know what will already happen to him and how we will react to it. If we did not know what was going to happen, how else would we react to the contents of the play?