Literary Analysis Of The Story Of An Hour

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Analysis of “The Story of An Hour” The short story “The Story of An Hour” is a story filled with situation, verbal, and dramatic irony; with the themes of love and the quest for identity. Situation irony occurs in the beginning when Mrs. Mallard got the news about her husband’s death. Her sister Josephine was the one to tell her the sad news. Mrs. Mallard was sad, which is what the narrator sets you to think by saying “she wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms.” The way the narrator used the words “wept” and “abandonment” gives the reader the image of her crying and feeling discarded. After the situational irony comes a metaphor that Chopin hits the readers with cleverly by saying “... pressed down by a physical …show more content…

A few sentences down is another unique metaphor that stood out to me was when the narrator said “… when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who had cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dream” the narrator compared Mrs. Mallard’s sob to a crying child. One of the themes I believed to be in this short story was love, which is shown also by how scared Mrs. Mallard was to face the truth about her husband and her life after his death. The narrator says “There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was to subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sound, the sent, the color that filled the air.” This shows how she began to think of life as a widow and became afraid of what she would have to look forward to. Verbal irony I believe was shown in “The Story of An Hour” because after sitting in the chair in front of the window thinking, the narrator tells the readers “When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: free, free, free!” Yelling out “free” is not something you would expect a grieving wife to say after being

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