In 1983, author Margaret Atwood published the short story Happy Ending. It is written in third person swapping from limited to omniscient, though ultimately being told directly toward the reader finishing off with second person and sentences talking directly to the reader mixed in along the way. The story consists of letters going from A to F, with every letter telling of some scenario that takes place involving the only five characters: John, Mary, Madge, James and Fred. Story A holds the typical boy meets girl, falls in love, marry and live happily ever after until death. With this familiar story, it is granted the title Happy Ending and becomes the symbol that the rest of the story will build off of. The following stories B through E all …show more content…
To show the level of basicness, the repeated phrase “stimulating and challenging” (95 Atwood) is used three times to describe the character’s John and Mary’s jobs, sex life and hobbies. A form of irony is used here with the repetition of the saying. Instead of going into much detail about what the hobbies are like, what exact jobs the couple had and how exactly they were challenging or just how exciting and stimulating their sex lives were, it is all left to the one saying. Its becomes irony since it is described as being stimulating and challenging, yet only reading the words is the complete opposite. No detail is purposefully put into these specific parts in life because it is unimportant to the overall picture. Everyone will have their own hobbies and jobs, but does it really define who that person is? This use if irony is to show how little of importance these parts of one’s life can be, and is why Story A gets left to be extremely short, followed by Story B which goes into greater detail and becomes the first example of an intruding …show more content…
Mary is still in deep love with John, conversely John only uses Mary for selfish pleasure. In here, Atwood breaks away from the telling of stories from third person to sentences of second. “He comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks him dinner, you’ll notice that he doesn’t even consider her worth the price of a dinner out…” (96). This interruption is to revert back to the main idea of Atwood talking directly to the audience and informing them of how the character John treats and views Mary, which is complete turnaround from the previous Story A which went into no detail into either character’s thoughts or actions whatsoever. Another form of specific detail gets used through similes. When Mary is thinking about John, she describes her dedication to him as trying to break out the real John that only she sees in him. “This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeeze enough” (96). The usage of like compares the situation she is currently facing with other implications in life such as butterflies emerging. This adds on to the level of depth that goes into this particular story B, which is not present in the previous story. This helps build the level of depth, and the reasons that people act in a particular way. These type of events define who
For example, in the beginning of the story, the narrator starts by talking about Mrs. Freeman. “Besides the neutral expressions that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings” (433). The irony in this first line is that she is a “Freeman,” yet only has three different expressions. Another example of an irony that is easily noticeable is when Mrs. Hopewell considered Manley Pointer as “good country people.” “He was just good country people, you know” (441). The irony in this line is that in the end, Manley Pointer, whom is supposedly is “good country people,” ends up being a thief who steals Hulga’s prosthetic leg and runs and not only steals, but admits that he is not a Christian, making the line, “good country people,” a dramatic irony. However, one of the most ironic characters in the story is Hulga herself as she understands little of herself, regardless of the high education she holds in philosophy. For example, Hulga imagines that Pointer is easily seduced. “During the night she had imagined that she seduced him” (442). Yet, when they kissed, she was the one who was seduced and having the “extra surge of adrenaline… that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house…”
As the irony continues this allows the reader to develop feelings and opinions towards the characters. No matter if one may have
“The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.” -Robert A. Heinlein. In the short story, “The Possibility of Evil”, the author Shirley Jackson uses irony to develop the traits of the protagonist, Miss Strangeworth, in her small hometown. Throughout the story, there are many examples of irony as Miss Strangeworth goes through her normal day. Irony is an engaging literary device used by authors to expose underlying intentions which become critical to the development of the plot.
Although the narrator feels desperate, John tells her that there is “no reason” for how she feels, she must dismiss those “silly fantasies”(166). In other words, John treats her like a child and gives her reason to doubt herself. “Of course it is only nervousness”(162). She decides. She tries to rest, to do as she is told, like a child, but suffers because John does not believe that she is ill. This makes her feel inadequate and unsure of her own sanity.
In the story “Love in L.A” written by Dagoberto Gilb, the main character Jake is living his life as a lie. Jake is daydreaming about a better car and life when he causes an accident on the L.A. freeway. Instead of Jake driving away, he decides to face the issue and realizes the person he hit is a beautiful young woman. From there Jake begins to tell lies to impress the women but, the truth was, Jake didn’t have a steady occupation or insurance and his fear of the unknown kept him untruthful. In the fiction story “Love in L.A.”, irony is used because, although Jake dreamed about a better life he wasn’t willing to do anything to change his current life, as well as make better decisions.
Pure Love in Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood, through a series of different situations, depicts the lives of typical people facing various obstacles in her short story “Happy Endings”. Despite their individual differences, the stories of each of the characters ultimately end in the same way. In her writing she clearly makes a point of commenting on how everybody dies in the same manner, regardless of their life experiences. Behind the obvious meaning of these seemingly pointless stories lies a deeper and more profound meaning. Love plays a central role in each story, and thus it seems that love is the ultimate goal in life.
Atwood’s “Happy Endings” retells the same characters stories several times over, never deviating from clichéd gender roles while detailing the pursuit of love and life and a happy ending in the middle class. The predictability of each story and the actions each character carries out in response to specific events is an outline for how most of us carry on with our lives. We’re all looking for the house, the dog, the kids, the white picket fence, and we’d all like to die happy.
The vision “she does the dishes” (Margaret Atwood 331) is not a fact that will interest the reader, but through this vision, we find out her reasoning “so he won’t think she is untidy” (Margaret Atwood 331). We learn a bit more about Mary’s character and her motivation that in the first story A. “Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer” (Margaret Atwood 331) is a statement that helps us to understand the depth of Mary’s hope and delusion. By using second person tone, the author prompts the story with her own comments, attracting the attention on certain
He uses the limited omniscient to give am intimacy in what Mary’s thinking and also the restriction of not knowing the other character’s actions until they are revealed at the end of the story but he balances this with providing context to her thoughts with the dramatic point of view. Usually, a person’s thoughts don’t need to provide ourselves with context for our own experiences, so Berry uses dramatic point of view to provide what would be missing from exclusively Mary’s thoughts. Berry uses the point of view illuminate Mary’s experience with belonging and the differences between the community of her birth and her new community. Her family had rejected her, “her parents told her. She no longer belonged to that family. To them it would be as if she had never lived” (67). That is enough to damage anyone’s sense of belonging and even though her new community welcomes, includes, teaches, and loves her like the family she lost, perhaps in her sickness a deeply buried insecurity of not belonging rears its head. Because her family didn’t accept her, Mary worries that her new community won’t accept her when she is at her worst, sick and insecure. But when she wakes she realizes that Elton had noticed, cared, and worried for her and in her sleep, her neighbor had come to her and cared for her. “It was a different world, a new world to her, that
Irony make things appear to be what it is not. Flannery O’Connor and Zora Neale Hurston are two ironic authors in literature. O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic, with a southern upbringing (Whitt); whereas “Hurston is a disciple of the greatest dead white European male, authors, a connoisseur of macho braggadocio, and a shamelessly conservative Republican who scorned victimism and leftist conformism (Sailer). Both O’Connor and Hurston use irony in their short stories; however, they use it in significantly similar ways.
Death is inevitable; if you want happiness in life, try A. Margaret Atwood, the author of “Happy Endings,” uses six separate short stories to depict outcomes with different scenarios. The author practices the use of flash fiction, which adds to the entirety of each version. Though this short story has portions of unusual context, the content can teach a reflection on life. As the reader analyzes all six versions, the gender roles are evident as the story progresses. Atwood starts the short story by introducing the two main characters, John and Mary, and then proceeds to tell a variety of options as to who they are and what happens to them.
The narrator is trying to get better from her illness but her husband “He laughs at me so about this wallpaper” (515). He puts her down and her insecurities do not make it any better. She is treated like a child. John says to his wife “What is it little girl” (518)? Since he is taking care of her she must obey him “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator thinks John is the reason why she cannot get better because he wants her to stay in a room instead of communicating with the world and working outside the house.
The author uses many complexities in the story like various tones, voices and the change in points of view. However, the most powerful writing strategy he used is a very strong irony all along the whole story, which demonstrates how harmful the
“Happy Endings” Analysis Everybody dreams of a beautiful life with a partner, some money, children, hobby, job, and death. Love story, revenge story, detective story, mystery story…they all have one thing in common even though the story that is given to us is limited. In the end, everyone dies. In her short story, “Happy Endings’, Margaret Atwood states that regardless of what the person has experienced in life, ending is equal for all people.
Irony is a useful device for giving stories many unexpected twists and turns. In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," irony is used as an effective literary device. Situational irony is used to show the reader that what is expected to happen sometimes doesn't. Dramatic irony is used to clue the reader in on something that is happening that the characters in the story do not know about. Irony is used throughout Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" through the use of situational irony and the use of dramatic irony.