Irony Essays

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is a powerful story that covers all aspects of discrimination in 1930’s Alabama. The novel is about long-standing prejudice and hypocrisy in a small southern town. It is a snapshot of how easy it is to judge and be judged by a community, …

* ‘[Entailment is] a condition of having your tail in a crack.’ This is ironic, as Jem, trying to be the superior, more knowledgeable older sibling, has completely made this up. Entailment is really a legal term to describe what someone can do with his/her estate and property. The irony …

Robert E. Hayden did not want to be known as an African American poet, but rather simply a poet. Because of his desire, Hayden endured much criticism from his own African American community. However, it was through this sort of detachment, that Hayden was able to stretch the boundaries of …

The central irony of Ambrose Bierce’s well-known story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”  is the tension between objective reality and dream reality, posited in the context of the story as thematic representations of specific ontological philosophies, which can be rendered in  literary terms as realism and romanticism.  The story …

            Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” has achieved a firmly established position in the canon of American plays. However, the play itself is traditionally misunderstood or distorted in terms of analysis of key topics and characters. From my standpoint, Tom, and not Amanda, though she is a powerful and striking …

1. Were you surprised by the ending of the story? If not, at what point did you know what was going to happen? How does Jackson start to foreshadow the ending in paragraphs 2 and 3? Conversely, how does Jackson lull us into thinking that this is just an ordinary …

Charlotte Perkins Gilman once said, “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver” (Brainyquote). Gilman’s belief that there really was no difference in means of mentality between men or women is strongly demonstrated through “The Yellow Wallpaper”. …

The title of Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations, refers to Pip’s many expectations. Pip expects to inherit money, but he first has to be educated a gentleman. Pip has “great expectations” of himself and Jaggers also tells Pip that “he is a young man of great expectations”. During the time …

At the center of “Cathedral” is a significant irony: a narrator who ignorantly disdains blindness while being oblivious to his own limitations in sight. Of course, the narrator can see with his eyes but does not realize the limitations he has placed on himself, and how those prevent him from …

For O. Henry, the short story was not just a literary act of communicating his artistic imagination, but also a vehicle to explore the extreme possibilities of such an endeavor. His stories are characterized by extreme unpredictability, transforming the genre into an active, pulsating living presence.”The Cactus” is no exception. …