literary analysis essay example irony

Irony in Literature

This essay about irony in literature explores how this literary device serves as more than just a source of amusement, delving into its profound role in storytelling and thematic exploration. Through examples from works like Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” the essay illustrates how irony deepens narratives, challenges societal norms, and prompts readers to engage critically with the text. By highlighting the different forms of irony—dramatic, situational, and verbal—the essay underscores how irony mirrors the complexities of life and encourages readers to look beyond surface-level interpretations. Ultimately, irony emerges as a potent tool in the hands of skilled storytellers, fostering a deeper understanding of human experience and the world around us.

How it works

Irony, an intricate literary device intricately threading contrast betwixt expectations and actuality, not merely serves as a tool for eliciting a mirthful chuckle or a nod of acknowledgement from readers, but as a profound mechanism to embellish storytelling, deepen thematic exploration, and articulate the oft unspeakable veracities concerning human experience. At its essence, irony transpires when verbiage conveys a significance diametrically opposed to the literal construal, or when outcomes flout original intents or anticipations.

Consider, for instance, the poignant dramatic irony meticulously woven by Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet.

” The audience, painfully cognizant from inception that the youthful paramours’ clandestine liaison is doomed, yet we watch, rapt, whilst the characters themselves blissfully remain oblivious to their predestined demise until it’s irremediably tardy. This utilization of irony elevates the emotional resonance of the play, embedding a deeper stratum of tragedy and prompting introspection on the themes of destiny, love, and misconception.

Irony may also materialize as situational irony, wherein the denouement is incongruous with expectations. O. Henry’s brief narrative, “The Gift of the Magi,” epitomizes this. A youthful twain, each devoid of opulence but opulent in affection, relinquish their most cherished possessions to procure a special Yuletide offering for the other. The irony unfolds when it transpires that the presents they procure are rendered ineffectual by the sacrifices they each make. The spouse vends her resplendent tresses to procure a chain for her husband’s timepiece, whilst the spouse vends his timepiece to procure combs for her hair. The splendor of this irony resides not in the futility of their deeds, but in the profound ardor that prompts their sacrifices, thereby enriching the narrative with strata of significance regarding selflessness and love.

Verbal irony, conversely, entails an individual articulating one thing whilst signifying another, frequently in a sardonic or wry manner. Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” abounds with instances of verbal irony, particularly in the colloquy of its protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet. Her incisive perspicacity and ironic observations critique not only the characters she interacts with but also the societal conventions of her epoch, such as matrimony and social ascension. Austen employs Elizabeth’s irony as a means to challenge and upend the status quo, proffering commentary on the broader social quandaries of her era.

The potency of irony in literature is not merely in its propensity to startle or entertain, but also in its capacity to engross readers in a deeper colloquy with the text. It necessitates a sort of pas de deux betwixt the author’s intentions and the reader’s construals, a dynamic interplay that enriches the reading experience. It’s a tool that, when wielded efficaciously, can transmute a straightforward narrative into a complex, multi-layered tale that resonates with verity and perspicacity.

The utilization of irony in literature also mirrors the intricacies and vicissitudes of life itself—where intentions don’t invariably culminate in anticipated outcomes, and where the superficial frequently belies deeper truths. Hence, irony does not merely adorn a narrative; it serves as a span connecting the ostensible to the concealed, the superficial to the profound, the articulated to the intended.

In summation, irony in literature transcends being a mere rhetorical flourish or a cunning twist in the yarn. It is an indispensable narrative stratagem that enhances engagement, enriches significance, and mirrors the intricate ironies of existence itself. Whether through the tragic unveilings of dramatic irony, the unforeseen reversals of situational irony, or the trenchant truths of verbal irony, this literary device endures as a potent implement in the hands of adept raconteurs. It challenges readers to look beyond the overt and to interrogate, with a discerning eye, the world around them and the narratives they are presented with.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Irony — Dramatic Irony In The Cask Of Amontillado By Edgar Allen Poe

Dramatic Irony in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe

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Dramatic Irony: A Great Literary Device That Adds Suspense to Your Story

by Joslyn Chase | 0 comments

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Do you remember the first time you read Romeo and Juliet ? Did you cringe when Romeo kills himself, knowing that Juliet is still alive? This is a perfect example of how to use dramatic irony in your story—a literary device that will inevitably add suspense to your novel.

Dramatic irony can be used in any story regardless of genre, but it is especially useful when writing stories where you really want to increase tension and suspense.

In this article, you’ll learn about dramatic irony, another useful technique for keeping readers on the edge of their seats.

Different Types of Irony

Irony is an excellent storytelling tool, but it’s a broad concept that covers multiple forms.

Verbal irony deals with the true meaning of a character’s words being the opposite of what they say.

For instance, if your dieting character says, “Wonderful! A hot fudge sundae is just what I need,” readers understand that a hot fudge sundae is exactly the last thing they needed.

Situational irony, on the other hand, sets up a pattern of cause-and-effect events that backfire. Your character misperceives a situation and acts on the basis of that misconception. As a result, the character experiences unanticipated consequences.

For example, in The Lion King , Simba believes he is responsible for King Mufasa’s death. Based on that mistaken idea, he banishes himself from the kingdom. In doing so, he leaves the kingdom in the tyrannical control of the one who really did kill the king—a tragic irony.

Both of these types of irony are great tools for story building, but today, I'd like to teach you about another type of irony—dramatic irony. You'll learn what it is and how to weave this literary technique into your suspense stories.

Dramatic Irony Literary Definition

In the Romeo and Juliet example above, the reason we cringe as readers when Romeo kills himself is because we know something he doesn't. Something that would change everything and bring a happy ending if he would only hang on long enough to discover it for himself.

But he doesn't. And therein lies the rub.

How Do Stories Use Dramatic Irony?

Delivering information in the proper sequence of events is critical to telling a good story—that means knowing what information to deliver to the reader and when and how to reveal it.

In a “whodunit” type mystery, the POV character sometimes interprets clues a little ahead of the reader, creating curiosity and a desire in the reader to “catch up” and solve the mystery alongside the sleuth.

In some types of suspense fiction, the character and reader discover and understand information at the same time, virtually thinking through it together.

In cases of dramatic irony, the reader is a little ahead of the character, understanding something the character doesn’t. This can be a superb way to create nail-biting suspense.

For instance, let's say you're reading a psychological suspense novel, and you know the killer is the protagonist's favorite uncle, but she doesn't suspect him. Your superior knowledge pumps up the suspense in every scene involving the two of them because you see the danger she doesn't.

Dramatic Irony on the Page, Stage, and Screen

The immediate and clear example of dramatic irony is in every horror movie you’ve ever seen. We in the audience have been shown the serial killer waiting in the bushes or driving the car that stops for the hitchhiker. We scream, “No, don’t get in the car!” or “Get away from the bushes!”

We have more information than the character, allowing us to make predictions they can’t. That’s dramatic irony.

The stories we love are full of dramatic irony. It gets its name from the ancient Greek dramas in which it featured so prevalently.

For example, in the Sophocles play, Oedipus Rex, King Oedipus swears vengeance on the killer of the former king, Laius. We in the audience know that Oedipus himself is that killer, and we watch with tense excitement to see how he makes the discovery and resolves the dilemma.

Shakespeare made free use of dramatic irony in many of his plays. In Macbeth, the prophecy of the witches puts the audience in the know while poor Duncan remains ignorant, bestowing on Macbeth his absolute trust, which leads to his demise.

Viewers of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle know from the beginning that Peyton, the innocent-looking nanny, is really a poisonous schemer intent on destroying the family. This creates an incredible sense of tension and drives the story forward with viewers hanging on every moment to see what happens.

See how stories use dramatic irony in this article. Tweet this

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Any day where she can send readers to the edge of their seats, prickling with suspense and chewing their fingernails to the nub, is a good day for Joslyn. Pick up her latest thriller, Steadman's Blind , an explosive read that will keep you turning pages to the end. No Rest: 14 Tales of Chilling Suspense , Joslyn's latest collection of short suspense, is available for free at joslynchase.com .

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Literary analysis: sample essay.

We turn once more to Joanna Wolfe’s and Laura Wilder’s Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Analysis (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016) in order to show you their example of a strong student essay that has a strong central claim elucidated by multiple surface/depth arguments supported by patterns of evidence.

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Sylvia Plath’s short poem “Morning Song” explores the conflicted emotions of a new mother. On the one hand, the mother recognizes that she is expected to treasure and celebrate her infant, but on the other hand, she feels strangely removed from the child. The poem uses a combination of scientific and natural imagery to illustrate the mother’s feelings of alienation. By the end of the poem, however, we see a shift in this imagery as the mother begins to see the infant in more human terms.

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There are several references to scientific imagery in “Morning Song” that suggest that mother is viewing the baby in clinical, scientific terms rather than as a new life. The poem refers to magnification (4) and reflection (8), both of which are scientific methods. The word “distills” (8) refers to a scientific, chemical process for removing impurities from a substance. The baby’s cry is described as taking “its place among the elements” (3), which seems to refer to the periodic table of elements, the primordial matter of the universe. The watch in the first line is similarly a scientific tool and the gold the watch is made of is, of course, an element, like the baby’s cry. Even the balloons in the last line have a scientific connotation since balloons are often used for measurements and experiments in science. These images all serve to show how the speaker feels distanced from the baby, who is like a scientific experiment she is conducting rather than a human being.

Paragraph 3

Natural imagery also seems to further dehumanize the baby, reducing it to nothing more than its mouth. The baby’s breathing is compared to a moth in line 10, suggesting that the speaker feels the infant is fragile and is as likely to die as a moth dancing around candlelight. A few lines later, the baby’s mouth is compared to another animal—a cat—who greedily opens its mouth for milk. Not only does the speaker seem to feel that the baby is like an animal, but she herself is turned into an animal, as she arises “cow-heavy” (13) to feed the infant. These images show how the speaker sees both the baby and herself as dumb animals who exist only to feed and be fed. Even the morning itself seems to be reduced to another mouth to feed as she describes how the dawn “swallows its dull stars” (16). These lines suggest that just as the sun swallows up the stars, so the baby will swallow up this mother.

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However, in the last few lines the poem takes a hopeful turn as the speaker begins to view the baby as a human being. The baby’s mouth, which has previously been greedy and animal-like, now becomes a source of music, producing a “handful of notes” (17) and “clear vowels” (18). Music is a distinctly human sound. No animals and certainly not the cats, cows, or moths mentioned earlier in the poem, make music. This change in how the speaker perceives the baby’s sounds—from animalistic cry to human song—suggest that she is beginning to relate the baby as an individual. Even the word “handful” in the phrase “handful of notes” (17) seems hopeful in this context since this is the first time the mother has referred to the baby as having a distinctly human body part. When the baby’s notes finally “rise like balloons” (18), the speaker seems to have arrived at a place where she can celebrate the infant. For the first time, the infant is giving something to the speaker rather than threatening to take something away. The mother seems to have finally accepted the child as an independent human being whose company she can celebrate.

Works Cited

Essay 3: A How-To Guide

What makes an effective researched argument.

Goal: The goal of any literary research paper is to add an original interpretation to a scholarly conversation about a literary text. Take a look at how rhetorical and literary theorist Kenneth Burke describes all acts of researched writing:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. [1] [2]

In a researched argument, you should:

Introductions

Sample Introductions

The Introduction should accomplish four steps:

Take a look at the sample introductions from Laura Wilder and Joanna Wolfe’s Digging into Literature. [3] Where/How does this introduction accomplish each of these four steps?

Schwab, Melinda. “A Watch for Emily.” Studies in Short Fiction 28.2 (1991): 215-17.

The critical attention given to the subject of time in Faulkner most certainly fills as many pages as the longest novel of Yoknapatawpha County. A goodly number of those pages of criticism deal with the well-known short story, “A Rose for Emily.” Several scholars, most notably Paul McGlynn, have worked to untangle the confusing chronology of this work (461-62). Others have given a variety of symbolic and psychological reasons for Emily Grierson’s inability (or refusal) to acknowledge the passage of time. Yet in all of this careful literary analysis, no one has discussed one troubling and therefore highly significant detail. When we first meet Miss Emily, she carries in a pocket somewhere within her clothing an “invisible watch ticking at the end of [a] gold chain” (Faulkner 121). What would a woman like Emily Grierson, who seems to us fixed in the past and oblivious to any passing of time, need with a watch? An awareness of the significance of this watch, however, is crucial for a clear understanding of Miss Emily herself. The watch’s placement in her pocket, its unusually loud ticking, and the chain to which it is attached illustrate both her attempts to control the passage of years and the consequences of such an ultimately futile effort (215).

Fick, Thomas, and Eva Gold. “’He Liked Men’: Homer, Homosexuality, and the Culture of Manhood in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 8.1 (2007): 99-107.

Over the last few years critics have discussed homosexuality in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” one of Faulkner’s most frequently anthologized works and a mainstay of literature classes at all levels. Hal Blythe, for example, asserts outright that Homer Barron is gay, while in a more nuanced reading James Wallace argues that the narrator merely wishes to suggest that Barron is homosexual in order to implicate the reader in a culture of gossip (Blythe 49-50; Wallace 105-07). Both readings rest on this comment by the narrator: “Then we said, ‘She will persuade him yet,’ because Homer himself had remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men at the Elks’ Club—that he was not a marrying man” (Faulkner 126)…While we agree that the narrator’s comment suggests something important about Homer’s sexual orientation, in contrast with Blythe we believe that it says Homer is combatively heterosexual.

Conclusion:

Sample Researched Argument

The White Gaze in “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

Paragraph 1

Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa, captured at a young age, and sold into slavery. Despite the violent history that she lives through, her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” opens by expressing gratitude towards a system only referred to in the poem as “mercy.” Due to this discrepancy between the violent history she lives through and the evangelical understanding of that history expressed in the poem, critics have long questioned whether her poetry is a true expression of herself. No one tells the story of Wheatley’s legacy better than Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who, in his article “Phillis Wheatley on Trial,” describes how the Black Nationalist movement zeroed in on “On Being Brought from Africa to America” because there was no outcry in the poem—no objection to being brought to America. The poem was absent of the longing to return back to Africa that the Black Nationalist movement invested in (Gates 87). These critics also decried her poetic style, which imitated White, Enlightenment poets like Alexander Pope (Baraka, Barnum, and Thurman, as cited in Gates 87). Despite this backlash to Wheatley’s poetry, the authenticity of her work remains hotly debated today. Debates over her poetry were revived in the 80’s/90’s when scholars like William J. Scheik, Sondra O’Neale, James Levernier, and Mark Edelman Boren began to document how the biblical allusions and metaphors of her poetry, when read closely, were more subversive than appeared on first glance. This is how Wheatley has continued to be read today, with scholars questioning to what extent her subversions were explicit enough to change the cultural landscape of eighteenth-century America.

Paragraph 2

This paper will argue that the binary readings of Wheatley presented—one in which she is an “Uncle Tom figure” (Gross, as cited in Gates 87) and another in which she is a subversive, revolutionary poet (Levernier)—are both self-consciously represented by Wheatley in the poem. The poem is an example of early discussions of Black identity formation, one in which she is locked into two modes of being: gratitude and resistance. We will start by looking at the most contentious aspects of the poem—the gratitude for Christianity. Looking at the rhetorical construction of the speaker/reader relationship, we will uncover how the poem imagines her White, Christian reader and, in turn, how that White, Christian reader imagines her subjectivity. Following, we will then look at the allusions to the Transatlantic Slave Trade to affirm that these allusions demonstrate the subversiveness of her poetry. Subversive both in demonstrating the White reader’s understanding of her diasporic identity and in showcasing the fluidity of that identity in its early formation.

Paragraph 3

Arguments against reading Wheatley in a subversive light hinge on the evangelical Christian sentiments that open the first lines, particularly the idea that Africa consists of a “pagan land.” As Henry Louis Gates discusses, for Black nationalist thinkers, her description of her African origins as a “pagan” place was a rejection of her Black identity, an attempt to assimilate to her white readership. However, these opening lines are particularly interesting because of the pronoun usage in the opening lines. The opening line says, “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,” (Wheatley 1). While on the surface the line looks like a benign Christian gratitude for salvation, the pronoun usage in these early lines suggests an alienation that Wheatley feels between herself and her African origins. She has been “brought,” perhaps we might imagine “removed” from her land. The disjunction between “me” and “my pagan land,” suggests a fundamental bifurcation of the self that begins the poem. In many accounts of Wheatley’s Black identity, she is conceived to be assimilationist because her poem suggests, “ludicrous [departure] from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies, and ballits,” (Baraka, as cited in Gates 87). But, I want to suggest that the bifurcation of the self that begins the poem, which initially may look like an assimilationist rejection of Africa—is actually a meditation on how the transatlantic slave trade has shaped her identity—an early example of Du Bois’s “double consciousness” of African-American identities.

Paragraph 4

As many scholars have noted, the poem seems to subversively contend with her relationship with evangelical Christianity, which we may note was a condition of her education. The reference to “mercy” in the first line is particularly troubling—as we know that it was not mercy, but the transatlantic slave trade that brought her to the U.S. How are we to read this reference to mercy? Are we to read it as a moment of cognitive dissonance between Wheatley’s understanding of her history and herself? Are we to read it as an imitation of forms of poetry that she was reading as part of her education? I suggest that we read it as ironic. In both of the interpretations mentioned above, there is a fundamental tension between the reader’s awareness and, supposedly, Wheatley’s awareness. In fact, the title page of the original publication announces that she was a “servant to John Wheatley”—the 18th century reader would have been well-aware of the implications of this position of servitude, would have been aware of the conditions of life that brought Africans to the U.S. Rather than looking at this line for absence of reference to the transatlantic slave trade, I think we should attend to the passivity of the line—the lack of agency she expresses in this opening of the poem. The passive construction of the sentence gives agency to mercy rather than any singular person for the double-consciousness that she is expressing in the rest of the line. It is because of this passivity that she is able to call the land “pagan,” the italicization of which suggests irony. In fact, Mark Edelman Boren suggests that stress is being put on the term pagan in order to undercut the conventional association between the idea of Africa as a pagan landscape and the Africa that Wheatley comes from (45). In this opening line, Wheatley seems to be undercutting the conventional notions that the reader might have of African poets—undercutting the idea that they are grateful for the violence being inflicted on them.

Paragraph 5

This passive construction continues to influence Wheatley’s perception of herself in the next line of the poem: “Taught my benighted soul to understand” (2). Based on the claims I’ve made in the previous paragraphs, we can trust that Wheatley has already unmoored the reader’s associations between both: the evangelical conception that the transatlantic slave trade was founded on benevolence and the association between Africa and paganism. The poem continues to make her identity the focus of the poem. In this line, she is now thinking about her “benighted soul.” While we may look at the denotative definition of this line and think that it suggests that her soul was lacking of the opportunity to be saved before she was enslaved, we might also continue to look at the passive construction of this definition. Wheatley uses the term benighted because, while suggesting that she lacked the opportunity to be saved, it also suggests that the lack of opportunity was bestowed on her by another force or person. There is an external influence shaping Wheatley’s identity in the poem—perhaps, that of the reader. As James Levernier notes, despite, or because of, the reader’s awareness of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the poem would not have been published if Wheatley expressed explicit protest of the conditions of her enslavement (174). At the same time, this passive construction as well as the irony in these opening lines suggests that Wheatley is self-consciously aware of the suppression of her ideas brought about by the presence of the reader. As she constructs the image of herself as a poet, she has to remove herself from her African origins, has to invest in the gratitude conditioned by evangelical Christianity, has to alienate herself from the consciousness of her enslaved condition.

Paragraph 6

In other words, our reading of the first two lines of the poem suggests that this poem is actually about her identity as a Black poet. In W.E.B. DuBois’s “Strivings of the Negro People,”, he describes “double-consciousness” as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” In the first two lines of the poem, we see the measurements of White evangelical Christianity—with its expectation that an African poet is grateful for her servitude—being ironically unsettled by Wheatley. If we look at the pattern of pronouns being used throughout the poem, we can see a self-consciousness in the first half of her octave, with a consistent attention on “me…my land…my benighted soul…I…” (1, 2, 4). Then, in the second half of the poem, as Wheatley shifts from a discussion of Christianity to a more overt discussion of the perceptions of Africans, her pronouns shift as well: “Our…Their…Christians…” (5-7). While the first half of the poem may look assimilationist, the second half of the poem showcases a conscious alignment with an African race. She is, as DuBois writes “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

Paragraph 7

In the opening lines of the poem, Wheatley seems to be contesting the White reader’s idea that the Black poet, Black person, is ultimately grateful for their condition. In the second half of the poem, her task is to define the Black identity. As she tries to do so, she realizes that she is limited by the terms given to her by the White Christian establishment. In the final lines of the poem, she writes, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (7-8). It is here that we get our first references to the transatlantic slave trade, if we choose to read them that way. The final line describes the condition of reformed Black Christians as “refin’d” an oddly classed word to use if we perceive that line as depicting the conversion of Christians (8). However, the word would also have been used as a reference to the process of ‘refining sugar,’ a process by which manufacturers remove impurities and color from the unprocessed cane. Given its most popular usage in the eighteenth century, I suspect that the eighteenth century reader would have associated the word “refined” with sugar manufacturing (“Refine, V.”). Levernier also notes that these words had already taken on the association with these industries in Quaker circles—that is, circles that sought to abolish slavery it the Americas (182). Upon further looking at the language of the last two lines, we may also see the simile “black as Cain” as contributing to our imagination that she is referring to sugar (7). While she is making a biblical allusion to the more violent of Cain and Abel, the homophone also makes the allusion to sugar cane, which is black in nature. By looking carefully at the language she is using, we can see that her description of the religious system of conversion is also an allusion to the process of refining sugar. As White Christians take indigenous people and convert them to Christianity, so too do enslaved Africans farm black cane and refine it into white sugar. In these final lines of the poem, Wheatley seems to acknowledge that the language of Christianity can’t escape the slave trade. As a poet and author, neither can she.

Paragraph 8

As Wheatley tries to define and articulate a Black identity, she finds herself limited by the language of the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, we can read her poem as an articulation of the ways Black identity becomes founded on the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. While the reference to the sugar refinement process is her most referenced subversive metaphor, she also refers to her Black-ness as a “die” and the race itself as “sable.” In other words, when Wheatley constructs race, she does it under the metaphors of the valuable industrial trades: either a dye used for clothing or a valuable fur. We can read these metaphors in two complementary respects. First, the metaphors are skin-based, suggesting that this early social construction of race is partially based on skin color. Second, the metaphors are both references to a violent process enacted on an object that is then likened to violence being perpetuated on the bodies of African slaves—either through the burning of skin as a result of the dying process or the skinning of an animal. As Gates notes, Seymour Gross has said that Wheatley was a “perfect Uncle Tom Figure” (87). However, this ironic use of dialogue suggests otherwise. This suggests that, while criticizing the White reader’s perception of Black writers, she also must criticize the transatlantic slave trade, for limiting her ability to articulate Black identity in the first place.

Paragraph 9

In other words, we may re-read Wheatley’s poem as an early articulation of Black diasporic identities. In Michelle Wright’s Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora , she discusses the difficulties of expressing diasporic identities in Western literature. “On one end stands the…hypercollective, essentialist identity, which provides comfort of absolutist assertions in exchange for the total annihilation of self…” she writes. “On the other end stands the hyperindividual identity…which grants a hyperindividualized self in exchange for the annihilation of ‘Blackness’ as a collective term” (2). Wheatley’s poem seems to be straddling these two identity positions—one in which her individuality as a poet, something she is praised for in the opening advertisement of her 1773 volume of poetry, is founded on a rejection of her African heritage and one in which she can be Black, but must be perceived as part of a “diabolic” or “sable” race. Looking back at my own analysis of this poem, it seems Wheatley is limited by these dual conceptions of her identity. However, I think the poem ultimately represents an act of liberation: by self-consciously examining the limitations placed on her by the transatlantic slave trade and Christianity’s role in perpetuating the ideologies of slavery, she is able to express a fundamental tenet of Black oppression—the inability to exist outside of socially constructed categories of being.

Works Cited

Boren, Mark Edelman. “A Fiery Furnace and a Sugar Train: Metaphors That Challenge the

Legacy of Phillis Wheatley’s ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America.’” CEA Critic ,

vol. 67, no. 1, 2004, pp. 38–56.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “Strivings of the Negro People.” The Atlantic, Aug. 1987,

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/ . Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Phillis Wheatley on Trial.” The New Yorker, 20 Jan. 2003, pp. 82-87.

Levernier, James A. “Style as Protest in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley.” Style , vol. 27, no. 2,

1993, pp. 172–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42946037. Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.

“Refine, V.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1053806037.

Wheatley, Phillis. “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Penguin Book of Migration

Literature , edited by Dohra Ahmad, Penguin, 2019.

—. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral . London, A. Bell, 1773.

Wright, Michelle. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora . Duke UP, 2004.

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The Lottery Literary Analysis – Summary & Analytical Essay

The Lottery, a short story by Shirley Jackson, exposes humanity’s brutal and inhumane actions through different characters. Set in a rural village, the plot highlights how traditional customs and practices can lead to the acceptance of cruel behavior. The Lottery literary analysis essay discusses the dangers of blindly following tradition and the need to question and critically evaluate social norms. It is an important summary of the destructive nature of blindly following rules. The Lottery analysis essay also explores the theme of tradition and its impact on society.

Basically, ‘lottery’ in this story is a yearly occasion in which an individual in the town is chosen at random to be stoned by hi/her allies and family members. Notably, the atmosphere created by Jackson in presentation of the sureness and the norm of the practice of lottery within the village is quite convincing that, this practice was readily welcomed.

The ultimate fate of all the practices presented in this short story is marked by ‘death’, perceived as redeemer for many evils people commit against each other. This paper presents the tools of characterization and the setting of the short story “The Lottery”.

One of the most outstanding tools of characterization in this short-story is actions. Though this story is not dominated by many actions, characterization is well defined by the few actions the characters are involved.

For example, Mrs. Delacroix is brought out in the story as being highly determined and quick tempered lady. This is reflected by her action of selecting a large stone ‘so large that she had to pick it with two hands in anger of ….” (Shirley 76).

More so, the unfolding of events in this short story seems as if Jackson is revealing the hypocrisy and evil-nature of human kind. As stated in the story, “They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip…manhandling each other without a flinch of pity…” (Shirley 281). Though the reader of this short story expects the practice of lottery to be beneficial to the villagers in a way, nothing of worth is gained form such practiced of lottery.

It should be noted keenly that, this short story portrays extreme evil committed in just ordinary manner, which implies an underlying evil of man. This quite evident in the way such evils presented in this short story are happening in just friendly atmosphere, reflecting the camouflaging nature of humans.

Despite the short story being not insidious until near its end, the author seems to be foreshadowing this notion of deadliness as brought out through M. Summers, who is in charge of lottery, and his colleague Mr. Graves. The picture brought out of Mr. Summers in this short story makes him seem a respected man as he coordinates various social activities.

This humble nature of Mr. Summers, yet a very dangerous one is reported by Shirley (282) that, “Mr. Summers was very good at all this ….. with one hand resting carelessly on the black box, he seemed very proper and important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins”. Such activities may seem normal with regard to the village norms, but they reflect high degree of human rights violation.

The main characters used in this short story depict the mood of the actual events in this short story. For instance, the name ‘Summers’ symbolizes the fundamental theme of the story, and ultimate outcome of the entire events (Marshall 3).

Further, the name of Mr. Summer’s colleague, Mr. Graves, who happens to be his assistant in activities of lottery, prefigures iniquity of ordinary people. Basically, imagery is clearly brought out in this short story by having the author give the names of the main characters portray the entire theme.

Together with hypocrisy, ‘lottery’ in this short story presents the weak nature of human nature. Considering that this act of lottery had been a routine in this village for many years, no one seems to question its negative impacts in the general human welfare.

As reflected in Shirley (282), “There’s always been a lottery and no one has been nervous about it…everyone goes on with it…” reveals how hypocritical the people in the village were.

According to Hyman (35) no one had expressed fear of disgust of the act, despite it being depriving human nature of their human rights for survival. The kind of evil and malevolence presented in this short story goes beyond human violence since all is done calmly and in unity.

As Marshall (3) suggests, the use of protagonism in this short story is a real reflection of how people are deeply engraved in hypocrisy and wickedness. Ironically, Mrs. Hutchinson, who emerges to protest and rebel against lottery, emerges as the victim of the act of lottery the day she was going to protest against it.

This retracts all acts of rebellion against the act of lottery, and everything goes on as usual. Though before drawing from her fellow women to face her fate she seems happy, Mrs. Hutchison she is brought out to be happy to leave to see the way her fellow humans are mistreated (Hyman 46).

This reveals the way oppressive norms and cultures deem hopes of liberalization from such oppressive cultures. Particularly, the death of Mrs. Hutchison marks the continuity of evil nature of human kind eternally, despite their facial appearance seeming friendly.

Generally, the unfolding of the short story reflects the way humans mistreat each other, presumably in conformation to cultural beliefs and practices. Since the act of lottery as presented in this short story seems to undermine human nature, people seem to condone such evils with less regard on their negative impacts.

As the story ends, the ‘light of hope’ for liberalization, Mrs. Hutchison, dies which implies the unending nature of human wicked nature and evil. Generally, the short story reflects the societal malpractices committed by mankind to each other, as though they are ordinary events.

Works Cited

Hyman, Stanley. The Presentation of Evil in “The Lottery”. New Jersey: Bantam Publishing Co., 2000.

Marshall, Garry. Analysis of “The Lottery” a Short Story by Shirley Jackson. New York: Lori Voth Publishers, 2003.

Shirley, Jackson. The Lottery. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1948.

Further Study: FAQ

📌 who are the lottery characters, 📌 what is the main theme of the lottery, 📌 what are the two symbols in the lottery, 📌 what is the meaning behind the story the lottery.

IvyPanda. (2023, October 28). The Lottery Literary Analysis – Summary & Analytical Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-analysis-of-the-lottery/

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IvyPanda . 2023. "The Lottery Literary Analysis – Summary & Analytical Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-analysis-of-the-lottery/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Lottery Literary Analysis – Summary & Analytical Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-analysis-of-the-lottery/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Lottery Literary Analysis – Summary & Analytical Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-analysis-of-the-lottery/.

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Dramatic Irony (Meaning & Examples)

November 15, 2023

What is “dramatic irony”?

In almost every generic, (recycled dribble) scary movie you can think of, you have your classic killer that’s about to pounce, but the characters in the story are left in the dark, both literally and figuratively.

The feeling of suspense—when you’re on the edge of your seat in anticipation of what’s about to happen—this is a result of the literary technique known as dramatic irony .

Wanting to break through the TV screen (or the page of a book) to let a character in on something that’s about to happen; this is precisely what dramatic irony aims to evoke in its audience. There are different types of irony, but dramatic irony describes when the audience knows more information about the story than the characters themselves do.

Writers use dramatic irony to bring complexity to the story, and to hook the audience so that they are invested and want to know the outcome of the story events. Used effectively, dramatic irony can have a profound impact on the audience’s engagement in a story, and can interweave layers of suspense and tension that few other literary techniques are able to accomplish in much the same way.

At its core, dramatic irony is when the audience is knowledgeable or aware of certain things that are unknown to some or all of the characters within the story. This gap between what the characters understand compared to the audience creates sense of tension, anticipation, or feelings of inevitable dread. Unlike other forms of irony, such as verbal or situational irony , dramatic irony relies on the audience’s awareness of a narrative relative to that of the character’s within the story.

The difference between dramatic and verbal or situational irony

Verbal irony occurs when the literal words of what someone says differs sharply from their intended meaning. Common figures of speech like sarcasm, understatement or overstatement are all types of verbal irony. An example would be to say “ the weather today is fantastic! “, when it’s actually gloomy and rainy outside. The true meaning is the complete opposite of what the literal words themselves say.

Situational irony can be similar to dramatic irony, but some key differences is that with situational irony, the reader learns of the events unfolding along with the characters themselves. With dramatic irony, the audience knows about key elements of the plot which the characters themselves do not.

Examples of dramatic irony in literature & media

Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare uses dramatic irony.

1. Romeo and Juliet

Can you mention ‘dramatic irony’ without also crediting its most famous example in English literature? The plot of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare shows dramatic irony in a tragic form in its iconic final act.

The audience knows that Juliet is not truly dead, but only appears dead from the elixir she drank. Romeo, believing that she is actually dead, acts on this information and kills himself too. As the audience, we know that the deaths would be preventable had Romeo been aware of the facts of the situation. However, it’s because of our awareness of this critical information that holds our attention to seeing how the rest of the story unfolds.

The Truman Show (copyright Paramount/Everett).

2. The Truman Show

The Truman Show might be one of the greatest movies of all time, and the story depends on the use of dramatic irony. Truman’s entire life has been a television broadcast on air for the public to watch. The only thing is that he doesn’t know this. The audience, on the other hand, is aware of his lack of information, creating a sense of suspense and anticipation as Truman begins to question the reality around him.

Because we know Truman’s reality is phony, and because we also know that Truman himself doesn’t know this about his own life, we are all the more invested to learn what happens as the plot thickens and unfolds.

3. Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex is an Athenian tragic play by Sophocles, and it is riddled with examples of dramatic irony. There are several instances throughout the play where the audience knows more than the characters themselves. Oedipus makes an oath to set out to find Laios’ killer; while, unbeknownst to Oedipus himself, he is the killer that he sets out to find. Had he known that he was indeed the one who killed Laios, he probably wouldn’t have pledged to find the person that killed him.

The entire plot of the TV series Dexter relies heavily on the concept of dramatic irony to work. The lead character, Dexter, is a forensic analyst that specializes in blood-spatter analysis. On his spare time, he is also a sociopathic serial killer that targets other criminals/serial killers. Dexter uses his employment in the forensics unit as a way to cover for his illicit activities on his off-time, but of course none of his co-workers are aware of his “other” side.

This double-life that Dexter leads, which the audience is aware of, but none of the other characters know about creates intense suspense and anticipation while watching the series unfold. It’s a straightforward example of how dramatic irony sustains and builds tension or suspense throughout a narrative.

Disney’s film Frozen clearly shows dramatic irony within its central narrative. The protagonist and titular character, Queen Elsa, turns everything she touches into ice, making her a threat to the safety of those around her against her will. Because of her icy powers, she hides away in her room, leaving her sister Anna alone and left to her own devices.

As the audience, we’re aware of Elsa’s condition, but we’re also aware that those near and dear to Elsa, i.e., her sister Anna, are not. This technique—where there is a gap in awareness between the characters within the story and those watching in from the outside, i.e., dramatic irony) breeds a specific tension that heightens audience engagement and, as its name suggests, is highly dramatic.

6. Most scary movies

Scenario : A girl gets into the front seat of her car, not knowing that the killer is hiding in the back. We (as the audience) know what’s about to happen, but she does not.

It’s the kind of things that makes you want to cover your eyes and not look, but you secretly have to look, because of the sheer suspense of it all.

7. Finding Nemo

In Finding Nemo, there’s a scene where Nemo’s dad is critiquing the school teacher’s capabilities in looking after his kid, and while he’s speaking with him and is not paying attention, Nemo swims away.

8. Beauty and the Beast

In the iconic Disney animated tale, The Beauty and the Beast , the central narrative relies on dramatic irony: Belle is unaware that “the Beast” is really a handsome prince put under a witch’s spell. We, as the audience, are aware of the true circumstances of the situation.

9. Legally Blonde

Another classic film, Legally Blonde , is rife with examples of dramatic irony throughout. Early on, Elle thinks she’s being proposed to by her college boyfriend (Warner Huntington III), only to realize that she’s actually getting dumped.

10. Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump is perhaps the simplest man to live the most extraordinary of lives; though the only one that may not see it that way is Forrest himself. Despite being a fictional character, Forrest’s approach to life with purely good intentions, and like a “feather in the wind”, led him to accomplish a great number of impressive things.

At the beginning of the film, Forrest’s mother (played wonderfully by Sally Fields) is told by a school authority that her son is mentally slow, and not to expect much from him. This movie shows what it means to break boundaries and labels, and that mental aptitude is perhaps not always the most important consideration.

Components of dramatic irony

Audience Knowledge: At the heart of dramatic irony is the audience’s possession of information that the characters lack. This awareness can take various forms, from knowledge about a character’s true intentions to insights into the unfolding plot twists.
Character Ignorance: The characters involved are unwitting participants in the dramatic irony. Their lack of awareness regarding key information sets the stage for the tension to unfold. Often, what guides their actions is an incomplete or inaccurate understanding, leading to consequences that the audience can foresee.
Narrative Tension: The inherent tension arising from the audience’s privileged knowledge creates a captivating atmosphere. Viewers or readers become invested in the unfolding drama, eagerly anticipating the moment when the characters’ ignorance clashes with the revealed truth.

Learn about other literary devices

What’s Alliteration?
What is Irony?
What is Verbal Irony?

“Beck and Call” or “Beckon Call”? Which is Correct?

Meaning of ‘beck and call’ ‘To be at someone’s beck and call‘ is an idiomatic expression that describes being immediately available or ready to be

What’s the Meaning of the Word “Connotation”?

Ever catch bad vibes from a text? That feeling or internal response you have from the actual words to communicate it, is its connotation; which

What’s the Difference Between Ambiguous & Ambivalent?

Are ambiguous and ambivalent the same? Something ambiguous (an adjective) is unclear, vague and open to different interpretations. To be ambivalent (also an adjective) means

When to Use Have or Had? (Explained with Examples)

When should you use “have” or “had”? When is it correct to use have, has, or had? Phrased differently, what’s the past tense of have?

What’s the Past Participle? (Explanation & Usage)

The past participle is a form of a verb that can appear as an adjective, or be used to form specific tenses and the passive

Emigrate vs. Immigrate (Meaning + Examples)

Meaning of emigrate vs. immigrate To immigrate is the verb form of the noun immigrant; referring to someone that’s moved away from their birth country

Recurring vs. Reoccurring (Correct Usage, + Examples)

Did you have a recurring or reoccurring dream? If you’re finding the difference between these two words befuddling, then this post is for you. How

What’s the Difference Between Nevertheless vs. Nonetheless?

Nevertheless vs. nonetheless Nevertheless and nonetheless are synonyms that both belong to the same part of speech; i.e, they’re compound adverbs that express contrast. There

Assent or Ascent (or Accent?)

When to use assent, ascent and accent The differences between assent, ascent and accent: Assent may be a noun or a verb: the former refers

Literary Conventions

Defining irony.

Irony is all about noticing contrast. No noticing by you = inaccurate interpretations.

Verbal irony occurs when the intended meaning and the stated meaning are different—and usually opposite. Huh? Let me clarify. Irony is when the connotation is the opposite of the denotation. Connotations are the contexts, the situations and feelings around a word. Denotations are the dictionary definitions surrounding a word.

When these don’t match up, a space is created. You see that space, and you react to it by giving that situation meaning.

Exemplifying Verbal Irony

Irony is like sarcasm. For example, if I said “That’s a Great tie” to someone with an extremely ugly tie, you would hear the tone in which I said it, right? You could look up “Great” in the dictionary and find that it means good, admirable, wonderful, etc. But “good” is opposite of the usage, right? I mean, I said it so he’d see it was ugly and bad . Some critics dispute this connection between sarcasm and irony.

How to Approach Irony

Ask questions about irony. Use the term in your discussions and your papers.

Do you think you’ll see irony in the works we’ll read? Will it be used in the same ways?

If irony is the difference between the stated meaning and the intended meaning, then is it used by all cultures?

Dramatic and Situation Irony: The Sidekick Types

Dramatic irony arises when an audience knows more about a situation than the character(s). The characters say or do something whose significance they don’t know. For example, you go to Oedipus the King knowing that he has married his mom. You know this, he doesn’t. So, as he discovers this, you watch and appreciate it.

Situational irony would result from a gapping—a difference—between what readers expect and what actually occurs. This is not to be confused with the popular misconception that irony occurs when something surprising or coincidental occurs. (Think of that 90s song by Alanis Morrissette, “Isn’t it Ironic?” which actually featured nonexamples of irony. Now that’s ironic!)

The Irony” by Jack Sirichumsaeng is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Irony. Authored by : Joshua Dickinson. Provided by : Jefferson Community College. Located at : http://www.sunyjefferson.edu . Project : Survey of non-Western Literature. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

A Summary and Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Lottery’ is the best-known story of the American writer Shirley Jackson. Published in the New Yorker in 1948 and collected in The Lottery and Other Stories , the story is about a village where an annual lottery is drawn. However, the fate of the person who draws the ‘winning’ slip is only revealed at the end of the story in a dark twist.

‘The Lottery’ forces us to address some unpleasant aspects of human nature, such as people’s obedience to authority and tradition and their willingness to carry out evil acts in the name of superstition.

You can read ‘The Lottery’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Jackson’s story below. You might also be interested in the following articles we have written on other aspects of the story:

‘The Lottery’: key quotes explained

‘The Lottery’: key themes discussed

‘The Lottery’: main symbols

But for the present, let’s start with a brief summary of the plot of the story.

‘The Lottery’: plot summary

The story takes place one morning between ten o’clock and noon on 27 June, in a village somewhere in (presumably) the USA. The year is not stated. The three hundred villagers are gathering to undertake the annual ritual of the lottery, which is always drawn on this date every year. Some of the children of the village are busy making a pile of stones which they closely guard in the corner of the village square.

The lottery is led by a Mr Summers, who has an old black box. Inside the black box, slips of paper have been inserted, all of them blank apart from one. The head of each household, when called up to the box by Mr Summers, has to remove one slip of paper.

When every household has drawn a slip of paper, the drawn slips are opened. It is discovered that Bill Hutchinson has drawn the marked slip of paper, and it is explained that, next, one person from within his family must be chosen. His family comprises five people: himself, his wife Tessie, and their three children, Bill Jr., Nancy, and Dave.

Bill’s wife, Tessie, isn’t happy that her family has been chosen, and calls for the lottery to be redrawn, claiming that her husband wasn’t given enough time to choose his slip of paper. But the lottery continues: now, each of the five members of the Hutchinson household must draw one slip from the black box. One slip will be marked while the others are not.

Each of the Hutchinsons draw out a slip of paper, starting with the youngest of the children. When they have all drawn a slip, they are instructed to open the folded pieces of paper they have drawn. All of them are blank except for Tessie’s, which has a black mark on it which Mr Summers had made with his pencil the night before.

Now, the significance of the pile of stones the children had been making at the beginning of the story becomes clear. Each of the villagers picks up a stone and they advance on Tessie, keen to get the business over with. One of the villagers throws a stone at Tessie’s head. She protests that this isn’t right and isn’t fair, but the villagers proceed to hurl their stones, presumably stoning her to death.

‘The Lottery’: analysis

‘The Lottery’ is set on 27 June, and was published in the 26 June issue of the New Yorker in 1948. Perhaps surprisingly given its status as one of the canonical stories of the twentieth century, the story was initially met with anger and even a fair amount of hate mail from readers, with many cancelling their subscriptions. What was it within the story that touched a collective nerve?

We may scoff at the Carthaginians sacrificing their children to the gods or the Aztecs doing similar, but Jackson’s point is that every age and every culture has its own illogical and even harmful traditions, which are obeyed in the name of ‘tradition’ and in the superstitious belief that they have a beneficial effect.

To give up the lottery would, in the words of Old Man Warner, be the behaviour of ‘crazy fools’, because he is convinced that the lottery is not only beneficial but essential to the success of the village’s crops. People will die if the lottery is not drawn, because the crops will fail and people will starve as a result. It’s much better to people like Old Man Warner that one person be chosen at random (so the process is ‘fair’) and sacrificed for the collective health of the community.

There are obviously many parallels with other stories here, as well as various ethical thought experiments in moral philosophy. The trolley problem is one. A few years after Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ was published, Ray Bradbury wrote a story, ‘ The Flying Machine ’, in which a Chinese emperor decides it is better that one man be killed (in order to keep the secret of the flying machine concealed from China’s enemies) than that the man be spared and his invention fall into the wrong hands and a million people be killed in an enemy invasion.

But what makes the lottery in Jackson’s story even more problematic is that there is no evidence that the stoning of one villager does affects the performance of the village crops. Such magical thinking obviously belongs to religious superstition and a belief in an intervening God who demands a sacrifice in recognition of his greatness before he will allow the crops to flourish and people to thrive.

Indeed, in the realms of American literature, such superstition is likely to put us in mind of a writer from the previous century, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose tales (see ‘ The Minister’s Black Veil ’ for one notable example) often tap into collective superstitions and beliefs among small religious communities in America’s Puritan past.

But even more than Hawthorne, we might compare Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ with a couple of other twentieth-century stories. The first is another ‘lottery’ story and perhaps the most notable precursor to Jackson’s: Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story ‘ The Lottery in Babylon ’, which describes a lottery which began centuries ago and has been going on ever since. Although this lottery initially began as a way of giving away prizes, it eventually developed so that fines would be given out as well as rewards.

In time, participation in the lottery became not optional but compulsory. The extremes between nice prizes and nasty surprises, as it were, became more pronounced: at one end, a lucky winner might be promoted to a high office in Babylon, while at the other end, they might be killed.

Borges’ story is widely regarded as an allegory for totalitarianism, and it’s worth bearing in mind that it was published during the Second World War. Jackson’s lottery story, of course, was published just three years after the end of the war, when news about the full horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were only beginning to emerge in full.

Hannah Arendt, whose The Origins of Totalitarianism was published three years after ‘The Lottery’, would later coin the phrase ‘ banality of evil ’ to describe figures like Adolf Eichmann who had presided over the Nazi regime. Such men were not inherently evil, but were aimless and thoroughly ordinary individuals who drifted towards tyranny because they sought power and direction in their lives.

What is Jackson’s story if not the tale of decent and ordinary people collectively taking part in a horrific act, the scapegoating of an individual? Jackson’s greatest masterstroke in ‘The Lottery’ is the sketching in of the everyday details, as though we’re eavesdropping on the inhabitants of a Brueghel painting, so that the villagers strike us as both down-to-earth, ordinary people and yet, at the same time, people we believe would be capable of murder simply because they didn’t view it as such.

These are people who clearly know each other well, families whose children have grown up together, yet they are prepared to turn on one of their neighbours simply because the lottery decrees it. And the villagers may breathe a collective sigh of relief when little Dave, the youngest of the Hutchinson children, reveals his slip of paper to be blank, but Jackson leaves us in no doubt that they would have stoned him if he had been the unlucky victim.

And the other story with which a comparative analysis of ‘The Lottery’ might be undertaken is another tale about the idea of the scapegoat : Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 story, ‘ The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas ’. In Le Guin’s story, the inhabitants of a fictional city, Omelas, enjoy happy and prosperous lives, but only because a child is kept in a state of perpetual suffering somewhere in the city. This miserable child is imprisoned and barely kept alive: the price the inhabitants of Omelas willingly pay for their own bliss.

Or is it? One of the intriguing details of Le Guin’s story is whether we are truly in a magical realm where this one child’s suffering makes everyone else’s joy possible, or whether this is merely – as in Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ – what the townspeople tell themselves .

Just as men like Old Warner cannot even countenance the idea of abandoning the lottery (imagine if the crops failed!), the people of Omelas cannot even entertain the notion that their belief in their scapegoat may be founded on baseless superstition. They’re making the child suffer, in other words, for nothing, just as Tessie Hutchinson is sacrificed for nothing: the crops will fail or flourish regardless. There are no winners in Jackson’s lottery: just three hundred losers.

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William Shakespeare

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Iago’s reputation as a man of honesty and morality is a clear example of irony. Othello says Iago is “a man of honesty and trust,” Desdemona calls him “an honest fellow,” and Cassio says he “never knew a Florentine more kind and honest.” Iago, of course, ends up deceiving all three of these characters, making these remarks highly ironic. Indeed, part of the reason why Iago is able to manipulate these characters so easily is because he has so effectively cultivated this image of himself as trustworthy.

The frequency of such remarks on Iago’s honesty— “honest Iago” becomes somewhat of an epithet in the play—is also an example of hyperbole, with Iago’s reputation for honesty being exaggerated for dramatic effect. Iago himself also ironically refers to his own honest character as part of his method of deceive others. “I am an honest man,” he says; “I protest in the sincerity of love and honest kindness.” Likewise, Iago constantly criticizes the supposed dishonesty of others. To Roderigo he berates Othello’s “fantastical lies” while emphasizing Desdemona’s supposed deceitful nature to Othello. That Iago lies about how others lie is, of course, greatly ironic.

By stressing Iago’s honest reputation, Shakespeare highlights how deceiving appearances can be, with this idea being a crucial theme in the play. The audience’s awareness of Iago’s actual dishonest nature while the other characters sing his praises—with Iago telling the audience as much in his soliloquies—is an example of dramatic irony, ensuring the discord between appearance and reality is obvious to the audience.

Irony is embedded into Othello right from the start of the play. In one of the earliest scenes, when Brabantio warns Othello that Desdemona may end up deceiving him, Othello gives a reply which proves to be ironic: “My life upon her faith!” The situational irony here is revealed in this line's double meaning.

While Othello means what he says in a figurative way, meaning that he has complete trust in Desdemona, it is the literal meaning of this line that will come to be true. It is Othello’s realization of Desdemona’s steadfast faith, and the consequent revelation of the horror of his own acts, that will ultimately cause Othello to take his own life. Othello’s life thus will rest upon Desdemona’s faith, but not in the way he means. The irony of the double meaning of this line also highlights the duplicity of language, with words' ability to deceive being a key part of Othello's downfall.

Accordingly, Othello's speech is also an example of foreshadowing, with his words proving strangely prophetic. At this point the audience does not yet know too much about how the play will end, but the use of foreshadowing provides the audience with hints of the tragedy that is to come.

By keeping the audience privy to Iago’s plotting throughout the play, Shakespeare steeps the whole of Othello in dramatic irony. Dramatic irony, a device where the audience knows more than the characters in the story, is a common device in classical Greek tragedy due to its ability to create tension. Likewise, in the play, it works as a powerful device that elevates the drama of the action. That the audience knows Desdemona is innocent, for example, makes the deception of Othello all the more frustrating and devastating to witness. Equally, the tragedy of the play’s ending is made even more acute by the fact that the audience knows it is coming all along. The imbalance in knowledge between the audience and the characters in the play emphasizes the ignorance and thus the vulnerability of Iago’s victims, strengthening the play’s emotional impact.

The use of dramatic irony also draws attention to the calculated nature of Iago’s plotting and allows the audience to see just how effective a villain Iago is. That almost exactly what Iago says will happen does happen allows the audience to see how it is Iago who holds the control in the play, making him an even more fearsome villain. Indeed, the drama of Shakespeare’s plays rarely relies on the tension of suspense, but instead the tension of dramatic irony. That the audience can see all the mechanics at work behind the play’s final tragedy is what makes the drama so poignant.

The play’s use of dramatic irony also highlights the fatal role of miscommunication in the play. When Iago sets up Cassio in earshot of Othello to make it appear as if he is talking about an affair with Desdemona, the audience’s awareness that he is in fact talking about Bianca allows them to witness how easily things can be misconstrued. Once again, appearance is shown to be untrustworthy, one of the play’s most crucial themes.

It is also possible that the audience’s greater knowledge in this scene may be intended to create a sense of frustration, with the audience being able to see the relative ease with which Iago is able to mislead Othello. Such a factor may serve to emphasize Iago’s mastery, but it may also serve to expose Othello’s weakness. That Othello is so willing to trust Iago gives him partial responsibility for his actions. Indeed, that Iago’s lies take root so easily suggests that there is also an innate capacity for jealousy and violence in Othello that is responsible for his downfall.

Iago’s soliloquies are used as a device to create dramatic irony by exposing Iago’s real intentions to the audience. The insights into Iago’s plotting emphasize Iago’s control and paints him unambiguously as the play’s scheming villain, weaving “the net that shall enmesh them all.” Iago’s seven soliloquies also add structure to the play. Littered throughout and structurally placed at the beginning or ends of scenes, Iago’s soliloquies signpost to the reader how the plot is progressing, making him a semi-narrator figure.

Indeed, the articulateness of Iago’s soliloquies highlights his mastery of language and indicates his capacity for storytelling. This is evident in Iago’s soliloquy in Act 2, Scene 3, for example, just after Iago convinces Cassio to ingratiate himself with Desdemona. It ends:

I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear: That she repeals him for her body’s lust; And by how much she strives to do him good, She shall undo her credit with the Moor. So will I turn her virtue into pitch, And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all. Cite this Quote

As this section of the soliloquy shows, Iago has a natural flair for language. Even in private, his speech is filled with figurative language and evocative images. Iago’s use of verse further highlights his sophistication, and the regular meter of his speech, written in iambic pentameter, reflects the measured and calculated nature of both his language and temperament.

Iago’s frequent soliloquies also emphasizes his isolation as a character. Iago does not confide his plan in anyone else; he devises the plot on his own terms, something which indicates his cynical and suspicious nature towards others. However, it also works to create an intimacy with the audience, Iago’s lone listeners. Such intimacy draws the audience in as Iago’s accomplices, with only them being privy to the machinations of his deceit. The resultant dramatic irony creates an imbalance of knowledge between the audience and the other characters in the play who will become Iago’s victims, a perhaps intentional attempt to implicate the audience themselves in the actions of the play. By telling the audience what he is going to do, Iago forces the audience to shoulder some of the burden. The audience itself cannot avoid Iago’s manipulation.

Iago, a character whose tendency to lie and manipulate is clear to the audience, is an unreliable narrator. While the play does not assign an official chorus or narrator, Iago’s regular soliloquies, in which he often recounts the actions of the play and foretells what will happen, gives him the function of one. His narration, however, is clearly biased, with Iago’s agenda against Othello made clear to the audience. The disparity between what Iago says in private to what he says in public—for example saying in private that he hates Othello, but in public that he loves him—unambiguously highlights Iago’s duplicity. Knowing this, Shakespeare indicates that Iago’s commentary on the events is unlikely to be trustworthy.

Iago’s function as an unreliable narrator has metafictional implications in how it draws attention to the power of language to manipulate. Iago’s power over the other characters in the play is achieved through his mastery of rhetoric, with him able to trick others by weaving convincing narratives. Iago manipulates Othello, for example, through his careful choice of words, a fact that Othello ironically alludes to:

And for I know thou ’rt full of love and honesty And weigh’st thy words before thou giv’st them breath Cite this Quote

Othello’s awareness of how Iago “weigh’st” his words before he speaks them is surprisingly insightful. Iago has of course very carefully constructed what he is saying to Othello, but in a way not done out “of love and honesty” but, on the contrary, out of malice and deceit. Nonetheless, the attention that Othello draws to the considered nature of Iago’s words reminds the reader of how Iago manipulates his listeners through language. Words are Iago’s weapon of choice. Consequently, the audience is reminded that they too are subjects of Iago’s contrived speeches. Iago’s soliloquies, for example, in which the audience is the sole listener, can also manipulate.

By drawing attention to this, Shakespeare highlights the manipulative power plays in literature more generally. Iago himself is portrayed as a kind of secondary playwright in the way he sets up scenes for other characters to witness. He manufactures the scene of Cassio talking about Bianca in earshot of Othello, for example, but tricks Othello by framing it in a way that makes it seem that Cassio is talking about Desdemona. As such, Iago skillfully chooses what to show and what not to show in order to get the audience to believe his chosen narrative. That Shakespeare allows the audience to witness this acknowledges his own potentially manipulative role as storyteller, with his play also carefully and deliberately manufactured to craft a particular narrative.

Foreshadowings of the play’s tragic ending can be found multiple times in Othello’s speech. Before he is fully convinced of Desdemona’s alleged infidelity, Othello exclaims:

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again Cite this Quote

The last part of this speech, when Othello says Chaos will come again when he loses his love for Desdemona, foreshadows the play’s ending, when chaos and mass tragedy will ensue as a result of Othello’s turn to hatred.

The effectiveness of such foreshadowing as a device is strengthened through the simultaneous use of dramatic irony. Though Othello is unaware how prophetic his words will prove, the audience at this point has already been privy to Iago’s private plottings and knows that he plans to tear Othello and Desdemona apart. This dramatic irony ensures that the audience can spot when Othello’s words are foreshadowing the play’s ending and heightens the play’s dramatic power. Othello’s obvious ignorance to the ending that will befall him elevates the tragedy of the play and creates sympathy for him.

That the audience knows more than Othello also complicates the audience’s relation to the play, as they feel forced to become part of Iago’s plotting yet helpless to stop it. This feeling of helplessness reinforces the exploration of the idea of fate in the play, with the use of foreshadowing presenting the play’s tragic ending as inevitable and predetermined. Othello’s speech has a prophetic quality, even if Othello himself is not aware of it. That what he says will come to pass potentially alludes to the idea that language is determinative. Such an idea proves central to the play, not only in it being Iago’s mastery of language that determines the characters’ actions, but also in a broader, meta-textual way. The actions of the play have, of course, been predetermined by Shakespeare himself. The use of foreshadowing reminds the audience that the play has been carefully and deliberately constructed, an awareness that reminds the audience of the power of language.

Othello and Desdemona’s marriage bed becoming their deathbed is an example of situational irony which highlights the play’s central theme of love’s fatal potential.

By having the marriage bed become the bed in which both lovers will die, Shakespeare perverts the marriage bed’s symbolism of love and fertility. Indeed, instead of bringing about new life, the marriage bed will come to bear only death. That Desdemona makes the bed that night with their wedding night sheets emphasizes the link and reinforces the irony. The perversion of this symbol emphasizes the disturbing nature of the violence that has taken place. In the final speech of the play, Lodovico commands Iago to look on it:

Look on the tragic loading of this bed. This is thy work. - The object poisons sight. Cite this Quote

Lodovico emphasizes the image’s disturbing quality, so sinister it “poisons sight.” It is important to remember how striking this image would also be to the audience, with the bed likely to be very prominent on the stage. That this is the final image the audience is left with when the curtain goes down highlights its significance.

The irony of the fatal nature of love in Othello is further reflected in the imagery of blood which is associated both with lust and violence. Othello draws this connection in Act 5, Scene 1 when he says:

Thy bed, lust-stained, shall with lust’s blood be spotted. Cite this Quote

Here the image of the blood-stained sheets invokes both the loss of virginity and the loss of life, linking passion and violence in a way that stresses the play’s central theme of the dangers of lust. Desdemona’s handkerchief functions in a similar way in the play, with the handkerchief, a usual symbol of love and courting, coming to be the fatalistic object that convinces Othello that Desdemona has betrayed him. The imagery of the handkerchief, which is white with red embroidery, mirrors the image of the blood-stained sheets. Indeed, we are told that the handkerchief has been dyed with virgins’ blood, a detail which ironically foreshadows the tragedy the handkerchief will play a part in.

The constant references in the play to female dishonesty and women’s dangerous bewitching powers prove to be ironic, with it being the female characters who turn out to be the most honest. Othello and Iago’s repeated emphasis on Desdemona’s deceitful nature, for example, is steeped in irony, as she turns out to be the truest character in the play and faithful to Othello to the last.

This irony is picked out by Emilia in the final scene of the play:

Othello: She’s like a liar gone to burning hell! ’Twas I that killed her Emilia: O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil! Othello: She turned to folly, and she was a whore. Emilia: Thou dost belie her, and thou art a devil! Othello: She was false as water. Emilia: Thou art rash as fire to say That she was false. O, she was heavenly true! Cite this Quote

Here, Emilia emphasizes the irony of Othello falsely calling Desdemona a liar. Her comment “the more angel she, and you the blacker devil” emphasizes this, with Othello’s misrepresentation of Desdemona’s honesty actually making him the more dishonest. Emilia’s remark that Othello “dost belie her,” meaning to give a false impression of her, further stresses that it is Othello who is the dishonest one. Furthermore, Emilia’s linguistic mirroring of Othello in the final part of this exchange— “she was false as water,” “thou art rash as fire”—turns Othello’s rhetoric back on itself in a way that inverts its meaning and further emphasizes the irony of his insistence of Desdemona’s falsity. That the truth of what has happened is revealed by a woman, Emilia, at the end of the play further stresses the proven honesty of women, adding an extra hint of irony.

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Literary Device: A Study of Situational Irony

Situational irony is a frequently used literary device that is essential to many stories. It adds both suspense and surprises to the reader. This can be seen in the three short stories: “The Possibility of Evil,” “Just Lather, That’s All,” and “The Skating Party.” Shirley Jackson’s “The Possibility of Evil” demonstrates the importance of using situational irony for effect. Overall, this short story serves as an excellent example of situational irony.

Throughout the story, the anticipation builds as the reader expects Miss Strangeworth’s letters to reach their intended recipients through the mail. Unexpectedly, one of the letters is discovered by the young Harris boy on the ground. He decides to take it to Don Crane, stating, “She dropped a letter addressed to Don Crane. Might as well take it to him” (Jackson, 228). Here, Miss Strangeworth accidentally drops one of her letters which ends up in Mr. Crane’s possession. Furthermore, the Harris boy informs him that it is from Miss Strangeworth. Given the contents of the letter, one would assume that Miss Strangeworth would be confronted by Mr. Crane, but this expectation is not fulfilled.

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In “The Possibility of Evil”, Shirley Jackson reveals the protagonist, Miss Strangeworth, feeling sorrowful after reading a note about her destroyed roses: “She began to cry silently for the wickedness of the world when she read the words: look out at what used to be your roses” (228). Someone had left an anonymous note with her mail, informing her of this destruction. This incident highlights situational irony in the story, but it is not the only one. Another example of situational irony can be found in Hernando Tellez’s “Just Lather, That’s All”, where numerous instances can be demonstrated.

While reading this short story, the reader anticipates that Torres (the military man) will be killed by the barber. The barber ponders, “And how easy it would be to kill him. And he deserves it. Doesn’t he? ” (Tellez, 50). However, despite contemplating the idea of killing Torres, the barber never acts upon it. Throughout the story, Torres remains unaware of the thoughts crossing the barber’s mind. Torres expresses his knowledge of the rumor that the barber intends to kill him, saying, “They told me you’d kill me. I came to find out. ” (Tellez, 51). Nonetheless, it is only at the very end of the story that it is revealed Torres did have some suspicions about the barber.

Both Hernando Tellez and Merna Summers employ situational irony to surprise and captivate readers. In her short story “The Skating Party,” Summers effectively incorporates situational irony in various instances. Initially, it appears evident that Uncle Nathan has genuine affection for Eunice Lathem, his future wife. The narrator, Nathan’s niece, describes them as the epitome of romance, stating, “Nathan and Eunice were the most romantic of all. Nathan was handsome and Eunice was beautiful and they were very much in love” (Summers, 190).

This is a statement made by Eunice’s mother to Uncle Nathan’s niece. Unknown to her mother, Uncle Nathan is actually in love with Eunice’s sister, Delia. When Eunice and Delia fall into the ice, it seems like Nathan grabs the first pair of hands he can reach. It doesn’t appear that he has a choice. Uncle Nathan says, “But I could see their hands on the edge of the ice, one pair of arms had white fur around them. And I grabbed the other pair” (Summers, 199). However, Uncle Nathan does have a choice.

In “The Skating Party,” the protagonist deliberately chooses Delia’s hands out of the different pairs of hands he could see. Throughout the story, situational irony is used to illustrate the contrast between what actually happens and what was expected to happen. This twist in the plot is effectively used in various ways. The stories “The Possibility of Evil,” “Just Lather, That’s All,” and “The Skating Party” all provide multiple examples of situational irony. While these are just a few examples, there are many other short stories that also incorporate situational irony.

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Dramatic Irony in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe

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Dramatic Irony: A Great Literary Device That Adds Suspense to Your Story

Different Types of Irony

Dramatic Irony Literary Definition

How Do Stories Use Dramatic Irony?

Dramatic Irony on the Page, Stage, and Screen

Dramatic Irony (Meaning & Examples)

What is “dramatic irony”?

The difference between dramatic and verbal or situational irony

Examples of dramatic irony in literature & media

1. Romeo and Juliet

2. The Truman Show

3. Oedipus Rex

6. Most scary movies

7. Finding Nemo

8. Beauty and the Beast

9. Legally Blonde

10. Forrest Gump

Components of dramatic irony

Learn about other literary devices

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’”

William Shakespeare

Sample details

Literary Device: A Study of Situational Irony

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