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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
Key Examples in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Irony
Explanation and Analysis—The Dears:
During a pointed moment of reflection, Miranda adopts the exaggerated voice of a Red Cross volunteer to ridicule the shallow performance of wartime femininity expected of women like herself. Using verbal irony and satire, she describes her own role at dances for enlisted men in a voice dripping with sarcasm:
It must be frightfully hard on them, the dears, to be floored like this when they’re all crazy to get overseas and into the trenches as quickly as possible….I didn’t know there were so many good-looking men in this country, good heavens, I said, where do they come from?…the way I feel about it is this, we must do everything we can to make them contented, but I draw the line at talking to them. I told the chaperons at those dances for enlisted men, I’ll dance with them, every dumbbell who asks me, but I will NOT talk to them, I said, even if there is a war.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Pictures of a Place:
Adam’s offhand comment about his expectations for war includes a quietly disillusioned simile that reveals how thoroughly mediated his understanding of the conflict has become:
Unlock with LitCharts A+I don’t know a darned thing about it, really, but they make it sound awfully messy. I’ve heard so much about it I feel as if I had been there and back. It’s going to be an anticlimax [...] like seeing the pictures of a place so often you can’t see it at all when you actually get there. Seems to me I’ve been in the army all my life.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—City Editors:
Porter uses dramatic irony and simile to undercut surface appearances and reveal characters as shaped by cultural performance. One such example occurs in Miranda’s observation of her editor Bill:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Bill had been raging about, chewing his half-smoked cigar, his hair standing up in a brush, his eyes soft and lambent but wild, like a stag’s. He would never, thought Miranda, be more than fourteen years old if he lived for a century, which he would not, at the rate he was going. He behaved exactly like city editors in the moving pictures, even to the chewed cigar. Had he formed his style on the films, or had scenario writers seized once for all on the type Bill in its inarguable purity?
Explanation and Analysis—A New Language:
Porter’s use of irony and pathos is concentrated in the quiet intimacy between Miranda and Adam, especially in moments when language fails to bridge the gap between internal emotion and outward expression. One such moment occurs just before Adam departs for the war and Miranda’s illness reaches its peak:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She wanted to say, ‘Adam, come out of your dream and listen to me. I have pains in my chest and my head and my heart and they’re real. I am in pain all over, and you are in such danger as I can’t bear to think about, and why can we not save each other?’ When her hand tightened on his shoulder his arm tightened about her waist instantly, and stayed there, holding firmly. They said nothing but smiled continually at each other, odd changing smiles as though they had found a new language.
Related Themes:
