Sherman Alexie's 'Use Of Situational Irony'

Various Ironic Situations
A police officer wins an award for being the best in the town. He goes out with friends to celebrate. Later that night the officer gets into a car crash. Afterwards it is found that his blood alcohol level was .11. This means that he was suffering from severely impaired motor coordination, blurred vision, slurred speech, and delayed reaction time. This is an example of situational irony because what really happens is the opposite of what is expected. Situational irony is easily found in everyday life from little family arguments to loss of life. It is also found in the three short stories “Because My Father Always Said He Was The Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ At Woodstock” by Sherman

Alexie, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although all three short stories have different authors and are written with different purposes, they all include examples of situational irony.
Sherman Alexie’s short story has a number of instances where situational irony is used.

The illustration of irony is first shown in the father and mother relationship. The reader would expect a divorced couple to stay away from each other. However this is not the case. “And even though my mother didn’t want to be married to him anymore and his wreck didn’t change her mind about that, she still came to see him every day” (Alexie 9). This shows they still love and care about each other, yet they cannot live together. Another example of irony is found in the father and Jimi Hendrix relationship. People would expect someone who lived as an alcoholic and drug addict and died from vomiting to not be perceived as a hero by anybody. The father, however, idolizes Jimi

Hendrix.
“‘Only the good die young,’ my father said.
‘No’ my mother said. ‘Only crazy people choke to death on their own vomit.’
‘Why you talking about my hero that way?’ my father asked.
‘Shit,’ my mother said. ‘Old Jesse Wildshoe chocked to death on his own vomit and he ain’t anybody’s hero’” (Alexi 9).
The father describes Jimi Hendrix as a prominent man and is genuinely sad that he died at a young age, rather than seeing Jimi Hendrix as a drunken musician like the mother does. Alexie uses examples of situational irony in her story just as O’Connor does in his.
To add, in Flannery O’Connor’s short story situational irony is seen is several examples.

First off situational irony is related with the grandmother saying, “I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that alose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (O’Connor 1). This leads the reader to expect that the family will not go on vacation to an area with a murderer in it. However, the grandmother ends up leading the family down a random gravel road and right into the Misfit. This is ironic because the grandmother had no intension of running into the Misfit and leading her family and herself to their deaths yet it happens anyway. Yet another example involving the grandmother is how she chooses to dress for the vacation. She wears a beautiful dress and a fancy hat all done up with lace because “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor 2). This is ironic because the reader does not expect a nice dressed lady to end up brutally murdered, with three gunshots to the chest, like she was. Both of this instances show irony in one specific character, just as the instances in Garbriel Garcia Marquez’s story

do.
Equally so, Garbriel Garcia Marquez’s story has quite a few examples of irony, particularly with the angel. Take the example of how the angel looks when he is first introduced. The reader would expect an angel to look beautiful, magnificent, clean, and godlike. The reader soon finds out that he is none of these. “He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth” (Marquez 1). This is ironic because the appearance of the angle goes completely against the readers first thought. In another case irony is shown by how Elisenda acts when the angel leaves. The audience expects Elisenda to miss the angel after all they went through together in the story. Instead, she gives out a sigh of relief when he flies away, for “he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea” (Marquez 4). She finally does not have to deal with the crowds of people the angel brought in or having to take care of him. She is now free to get on with her life.
It is sometimes hard to get on with life after ironic situations occur. This is because many of these situations change one’s life. Such as the police officer who will be taken to trial and forced to quit his job, the characters in these three stories also have changes made to their lives. In Alexie’s story the father and son relationship is wrecked, O’Connor’s characters have stopped living, and Marquez’s characters have to adjust to a seemingly empty house. All of these situations include irony even though they were written by different authors with different motives.