Previous
Imagery
Definition of Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how... read full definition
Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Smart Fools:
In Chapter 4, Byron tells Hightower about Brown's testimony to the sheriff, including his accusation that Christmas has Black ancestry. Brown uses verbal irony to insult the townspeople for failing to realize the Christmas is Black, but his accusation reveals an important situational irony:
‘You’re so smart,’ he says. ‘The folks in this town is so smart. Fooled for three years. Calling him a foreigner for three years, when soon as I watched him three days I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am. I knew before he even told me himself.’ And them watching him now, and looking now and then at one another.
Related Themes:
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—What's in a Name:
In Chapter 6, Christmas flashes back to his early childhood at the orphanage and his adoption by McEachern. The chapter ends on a note of situational irony, as the matron tells McEachern that he is free to change the child's name:
Unlock with LitCharts A+They were in the matron’s office; he standing motionless, not looking at the stranger’s eyes which he could feel upon him, waiting for the stranger to say what his eyes were thinking. Then it came: “Christmas. A heathenish name. Sacrilege. I will change that.”
“That will be your legal right,” the matron said. “We are not interested in what they are called, but in how they are treated.”
Related Themes:
Chapter 13
Explanation and Analysis—Gunpoint:
Faulkner uses dramatic irony and perspective shifts as a motif in the novel, often circling back to the same event from multiple characters' perspectives. For example, in Chapter 13, the boy who drove Christmas away from Joanna's burning house recounts his own version of events:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The boy believed that he was about to be robbed and even killed, and he told how he was about to trick the man into permitting him to drive right up into his own front yard, where he intended to stop the car and spring out and shout for help, but that the man suspected something and forced him to stop the car and let him out.
Related Themes:
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Milly's Baby:
In Chapter 15, a group of men in Mottstown brings Mr. Hines home after he recognizes Joe Christmas and calls for him to be lynched. The scene ends on a note of dramatic irony and foreshadowing when Mrs. Hines asks her husband about "Milly's baby":
Unlock with LitCharts A+Eupheus. You listen to me. You got to listen to me. I aint worried you before. In thirty years I aint worried you. But now I am going to. I am going to know and you got to tell me. What did you do with Milly’s baby?
Related Themes:
Chapter 18
Explanation and Analysis—Monks in a Cloister:
In Chapter 18, the townspeople gather beneath the portico in the square while the Grand Jury decides Joe Christmas's fate. Faulkner uses a simile as he comments on the situational irony of the townspeople's gawking:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...][C]ountrymen in overalls moved, with almost the air of monks in a cloister, speaking quietly among themselves of money and crops, looking quietly now and then upward at the ceiling beyond which the Grand Jury was preparing behind locked doors to take the life of a man whom few of them had ever seen to know, for having taken the life of a woman whom even fewer of them had known to see.
Related Themes:
