What is Irony?

• Irony is a literary device used to show a special kind of contrast between appearance and reality.

• Irony is often used by writers to show humor

• There are 3 types of frequently used irony in literature

Situational Irony

• When a character or the reader expects one thing, but something very different happens or is true.

• Ex. Your friend calls to tell you that she will not be calling you, because she is not allowed to use the phone. 

Dramatic Irony

• When the reader knows something that the character does not know.

• Ex. A character in a story is waiting for his mother to pick him up and take him to his soccer game. Readers learn that he falls asleep while waiting. When his mother gets home, she thinks he has gotten a ride from a friend. She goes to his game without him, to watch him play.

Verbal Irony

• When a character says one thing but means another. 

• Ex. After struggling through a difficult test, a student says, "Well, that was easy. All my studying really paid off."

​

More Examples of Verbal Irony

​

• Mother: “I see you ironed your shirt.”

  Boy: “But I just dug it out of the bottom of the hamper.”

• A man commenting on the beautiful weather you’ve been having just five minutes before a tornado rips through your house.

​

More Examples of Situational Irony

​

• • A rat infestation at the Department of Sanitation.

  • A thief's house being broken into at the same time he was robbing someone's house.

​

More Examples of Dramatic Irony

​

• • • In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet stabs through a curtain thinking his traitorous, murdering uncle is there, only to learn that he actually stabbed and killed the father of the woman he loves, and a man for whom he had the utmost respect and admiration.

    • In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Elizabeth Proctor lies and tells the investigator that her husband never had an affair (in fact, he had), right before John Proctor publicly declared that his wife never had—and never would—lie.

​RECAP

Irony is a literary device in which words are used to express a contradiction between appearance and reality. There are 3 types of irony.

​

Verbal irony is when a speaker or writer says one thing but actually means the opposite.

​

Situational irony is when the outcome of a situation is inconsistent with what we expect would logically or normally occur.

​

Dramatic irony is when the audience or the reader is aware of something that a character does not know.