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Situational irony the crucible
Situational irony the crucible
Situational irony the crucible
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Unexpected alterations occur in everyone’s life. While one anticipates something to happen, adulthood changes the plan ahead. These unexpected turns have a name: irony. Consequently, ironic situations are just a part of growing up. Likewise, Alice Munro has masterly presented life’s irony. Her short stories explore the social realism of rural towns as well as practical reality. They are intellectually complex with well round engaging characters entangled within an interesting plot line. Most importantly, the guided principle to her stories is surprise. Just as the readers believe they know what will happen next, the plot shifts to where the elements fuse into a meaningful ending. One of the short stories related to this principle is “How I Met My Husband.” However, the irony presented in this story offers readers something more than just a dramatic twist. The use of irony in Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” demonstrates how in every situation, each individual holds a different perspective than the others involved.
In “How I Met My Husband”, Munro demonstrates how a young girl attempts to understand the adult world. The story begins by describing how the charming Chris Watter’s low flying airplane stirs the Peebles family, Loretta Bird, and fifteen-year old housemaid Edie. Sequentially, the plot derives from Edie and Chris’s developing connection. As the relationship starts to bloom, so does Edie. As stated by Hallvard Dahlie, Chris “brings her to the edge of, but not onto, the realities of his world: sexual experiences, adult betrayals, and infidelities” (Dahlie 65). In turn, this relates to how couples may not feel the same about each other. For example, when Chris complemented Edie at the initial encounter, she says, “I w...
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...other. Finally, Munro teaches readers life is a fun house; with every turn, the unexpected happens. By the use of ironic events in “How I Met My Husband”, Munro demonstrates how different perceptions and interpretations can be formed by a single event.
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Dahlie, Hallvard. “The Fiction of Alice Munro.” Ploughshares 4.3 (1978): 56-71. JSTOR. Web. 3 March 2010
Munro, Alice. “How I Met My Husband.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Diana Gioia. 12th ed. New York: Pearson, 2013. 218-229. Print.
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Porter, Katherine. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 11th ed. New York: Longman, 2010. 79-86. Print.
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Alice Munro’s ancestry traces back to Scottish-Presbyterian and Anglican roots which made a large impact on her outlook of the world. Anglicans were very strict and believed that using the wrong fork at dinner could be considered in itself a sin--these roots made her well behaved and very aware of her actions.The other half of Munro’s ancestry led to Scottish Presbyterians which made her explicitly aware of social class, what separated each class, how higher classes acted towards lower classes, and where she and everyone else belonged. The Presby side also led to her constantly examining her own deeds, emotions, and motives and analyzing if they could be considere...
Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. By Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press, Westpoint, Connecticut, London, 1999
It has been said of Anton Chekhov, the renown Russian short-story writer, that in all of his “work, there is never exactly a point. Rather we see into someone’s hear – in just a few pages, the curtain concealing these lives has been drawn back, revealing them in all their helplessness and rage and rancor.” Alice Munro, too, falls into this category. Many of her short-stories, such as “Royal Beatings” focus more on character revelation rather than plot.
When a wife surprises her husband on his birthday, an ironic turn of events occurs. Katherine Brush’s “The Birthday Party” is a short story about relationships, told from the perspective of a nearby observer. Brush uses the words and actions of the married couple to assert that a relationship based on selfishness is weak.
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.
Furthermore, Brush employed situational irony to help present the purpose. Brush started her work with a normal date turning into an occasion, since it ended up being a surprise for the husband the reader would conclude a happy ending
Surprise can lead to happiness, or surprise can lead to depression. Situational irony is when somebody expects something to go one way, but it really happens the exact opposite way. Situational irony can also change the reader’s mind in a way they will never believe. In “The Ransom of Red Chief,” O. Henry uses situational irony to amuse the reader. In “The Necklace,” Guy de Maupassant uses a feeling of compassion for the short story. In “The Ransom of Red Chief” and in “The Necklace,” O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, and any author can use situational irony to affect the reader's emotions.
To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless cruelty.
Alice Munro's creation of an unnamed and therefore undignified, female protagonist proposes that the narrator is without identity or the prospect of power. Unlike the narrator, the young brother Laird is named – a name that means "lord" – and implies that he, by virtue of his gender alone, is invested with identity and is to become a master. This stereotyping in names alone seems to suggest that gender does play an important role in the initiation of young children into adults. Growing up, the narrator loves to help her father outside with the foxes, rather than to aid her mother with "dreary and peculiarly depressing" work done in the kitchen (425). In this escape from her predestined duties, the narrator looks upon her mother's assigned tasks to be "endless," while she views the work of her father as "ritualistically important" (425). This view illustrates her happy childhood, filled with dreams and fantasy. Her contrast between the work of her father and the chores of her mother, illustrate an arising struggle between what the narrator is expected to do and what she wants to do. Work done by her father is viewed as being real, while that done by her mother was considered boring. Conflicting views of what was fun and what was expected lead the narrator to her initiation into adulthood.
Westwood, M. “What are examples of Verbal, Situational< and Dramatic Irony in ‘The Story of an Hour.’” E-Notes. E-Notes, Inc., 30 Sept 2013. Web. 17 March 2014
Whitted, Qiana. "Alice Walker (b. 1944)." New Georgia Encyclopedia. N.p., 4 Sept. 2013. Web. 9 Oct. 2013.