Situational Irony In The Ransom Of Red Chief

The Ransom of Red Chief is an amusing story that contains many points of situational irony. Two guys are in desperate need of two thousand dollars, so the only way they can think of obtaining this money is by kidnapping. Next, they go into town to try and find a wealthy man with a child to snatch, and after sizing up their victim they forcefully grab him and head back to their camp. Among getting there, they discover that their hostage is more than a handful to contain, and begin to question why they took him in the first place. His scheming tricks and ruthless pranks are starting to scare the two guys, and they begin to contemplate if he is worth the money. Find out what happens to the poor men and the rambunctious little boy by reading this clever story of

twists and turns for yourself.
In both the story and the video alike, there are numerous counts of situational irony.

Situational irony is when something happens that was unexpected and some may refer to it as a plot twist. One count of this was during the video when the men were kidnapping the young boy. The tired parents did nothing about the kidnapping even though they witnessed the whole thing unfold right in front of them. This is very bizarre, usually your parents are supposed to protect their children but the young boys parents seem unconcerned and almost happy to see their child leaving. Another section of text that is full of irony, is when the two males, Sam and Bill, ask for the ransom money to return the child. Instead of paying the money, which is what was expected, the humorous father insist on the men paying him two hundred and fifty dollars to take the annoying child off their hands. This is very ironic because usually your loving father would pay any amount of money to get you back. However, this time the little boys guardian will only take him if he is paid. Situational Irony is usually added to a story to make it ludicrous and captivating, which is the exact reason it is added in this story and into the brisk

video.
This alluring story and pleasing video complement each other very well and have a multitude of analogy between them. First, in both types of stories, the adolescent boy is berserk and boisterous. He is uncontainable and utterly rowdy throughout the whole period of time he is captured. Another similarity is, the location of Sam and Bill’s secret hideout, which is a dark,eerie cave at a high altitude in a steep,rocky mountain. Further more, another similarity is the amount of money that was asked for the return of the boy. This absurd amount being, at first, two thousand dollars but later dropped to one thousand five hundred dollars.
Despite the many similarities, there were also numerous drastic and some slight differences as well. The first difference being that the parents talk about the kidnapping and witness it happening in the video. In the book, the rowdy boys parents are hardly ever mentioned yet in the video they are shown and are speaking. One other difference is in the book it talks about them going into the mysterious cave, but in the video it never shows them inside it. Instead, they sleep and build their fire outside of the cave on the ground unlike in the story. Other than those two i just mentioned, there was another slight difference between the two stories. In the video the two men stopped at a local store or business to try and scope out the children available for abduction. However, in the story the go straight to talking about the boy and taking him instead of describing how they pinpointed him.
In spite of both the video and the novella being very enticing and climatic, I believe that to fully understand the plot and the best format for learning was by far the story. I chose the story over the video because in my opinion, the story gave so much more detail and totally described everything to the point where I knew exactly what was happening and at what time. It specifically told me what was going on and allowed me to connect more with the actions taken by the characters. So, if I had to recommend one, I would definitely pick the novella over the video.