The Use Of Irony In The Tell-Tale Heart

Throughout this semester’s stories, I have noticed one common motif in almost every literary work: deeper meaning. Authors whom write shorter stories need to provide hidden meaning in their works to arouse profound thought. Many of these short stories display one of the three ironies such as verbal, situation and dramatic. It can be used to provide plot twists, or even reveal to each reader’s inner bias that they didn’t even realize they had. Another annotation used is glossing. Glossing makes a literary work more complex with hidden significance. Each of the following stories displays at least one of these literary devises which gave each short story a sense of complexity for further analysis and controversy. One of the first stories I

The irony in this passage is that the girls do not hear him and are gone from his life before his boss can even acknowledge his resignation. This irony forces Sammy to face a more mature reality that even if you stand up to a supposed injustice, it will usually be ignored without acknowledgement. Through this use of irony Sammy realizes that the only one effected by his sacrifice for “justice” is him because it cost him his job in the process. Another literary work during our readings that has sufficient irony was The Tell-tale Heart by Edgar A. Poe. In The Tell-tale Heart, the narrator(unnamed) states to the reader, “I heard all things in heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How am I mad?” (387). This demonstrates dramatic irony because by trying to prove to the reader that he isn’t insane, it shows just how mad he really is. This quote is just one example of the twisted psychosis of the narrator. In Tell-tale Heart, “His room was a black as pitch with thick darkness (for the shutters were close fastened through fear of robbers) …” (388). This is situationally ironic because the old man fears robbers but the only whom wishes to do bodily harm to him is already in the house, creeping inside the doorway. One of our latest short

In A&P, there wasn’t a lot of irony, but the irony provided changed the story completely. The Tell-tale Heart was very ironic because throughout the whole story the psychotic narrator tries to prove to the reader that he is not crazy but in doing so reveals just how nutty he really is. A Good man is Hard to Find was full of irony, case in point, the grandmother is killed because by judging others based on their appearance, she thought that the Misfit was a man gentleman whom later shots her entire family and herself. Sometimes it is better to have quality over quantity when it comes to irony. In addition to irony there is glossing present as well. In The Yellow Wallpaper, it mentions Weir Mitchell, whom treated the author and many other patients’ but was later de-popularized by The Yellow Wallpaper because it showed how the “rest cure” was unsuccessful. Two majorly creepy examples of glossing were found in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, such as the reference to Bob Dylan’s song “It’s all over now, baby blue” and the numbers 33, 19, 17 which were from the old testament. These literary devices are very powerful in creating deeper meaning in shorter