Essays on Irony

In Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time, the author brings out the irony surrounding various characters with Pechorin being at the center stage. The portrayal of Pechorin is viewed in the book as an exemplary Byronic anti-hero and Lermontov describes him as a...

Mute characters play a significant role in plays. They are the characters most people would ignore because they do not say anything; however, mute characters may be the characters who say the most in a play. Within Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht,...

Irony as Depicted in ‘Rape Fantasies’ and ‘The Girl in the Flammable Skirt’ In the” rape fantasies” passage, and” the girl in the flammable skirt passage,” irony takes center stage, being featured in the comical incidences that could also make the irony in the passages...

‘Ozymandias’ is a poem of Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is written in first person as a second hand account from a traveler and includes an anecdote of someone that the traveler once ‘met’. The poem is a sonnet, also written with iambic pentameter. Sonnets are...

Writers often use many tools while writing. Irony is just one example. When writers want their words to have a double meaning, they use irony. It is often clear when the words of the narrator or character of the writing is different from the meaning...

For centuries, cultures around the world have used fables not only for entertainment but as a method to teach significant moral lessons. Fables have given cultures an opportunity to highlight their moral values and provide individuals a path to practice their traditions through their minds...

Edgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer and critic who is best known for his fantastical horror stories and genre-founding detective stories. Poe considered himself primarily a poet. Although in most of his works his narrators are unreliable and sound insane, it is not...

Irony as a literary device has been used in order to achieve a sense of reality within works of fiction. It can be seen a sort of contrast between the surface meaning of something that is said or done and the actual, underlying meaning of...

Despite the fact that it is hard to be against the general public’s convictions writer Kate Chopin beats that to create a quality thought-provoking literature. Utilizing conventions of narrative stories like character development, plot development, and irony to her advantage, she lures readers into the...

Throughout Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” there were many instances of irony mostly caused by the men, which ultimately prevented them from completing their goal of solving Mr. Wright’s murder. Glaspell wanted to emphasize the men’s lack of respect for the women’s intelligence...

In most stories and poems, they tend to include irony. Irony plays a big role in stories, giving readers a gasp or a surprise for not expecting what is to come. Although there are many stories with irony in them, Kate Chopin’s “The storm” and...

Nelson Mandela once said, “Freedom cannot be achieved unless the women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression”. As true as this statement rings, it’s not an original one. The discussion of the oppressed woman had been around over a century before he uttered...

Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” exemplifies characters’ defects ironic to the title. Rather than highlighting goodness, O’Connor focuses on the bad traits the characters carry. An ideology of Christianity is that one must have a healthy mind, body, and soul, otherwise one may be lacking...

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis runs the gamut of humor, from whimsical and childish to dark and ironic. This humor can be slapstick jokes, found in the captions with accompanying humorous images, or it can be more subtle, as a double entendre in the text or situational...

As children, numerous individuals can recall reading Dr. Seuss’s books from time to time. In his book The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss illustrates a silly fight about butter as a way of showing classic judgment of our world. There are two different groups of...

The essay “Once Upon a Time” by Nadine Gordimer, is a moral story about the racism in South Africa that occurs between the wealthy and the poor. Gordimer explains this story came about when someone wrote her and said that “every writer ought to write...

“Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.” Through this statement, Anatole France, a 1921 Nobel Prize recipient, states his belief that irony is only lighthearted reflection. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne employs irony to reveal the distinctly morose themes of The Scarlet Letter....