The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky employs situational irony in his characterization of Fyodor Karamazov, who takes pleasure in his own feelings of shame and embarrassment. Describing Fyodor’s response to his first wife’s abandonment of him, Dostoevsky writes that:

In the intermissions, he drove over most of the province, tearfully complaining to all and sundry that Adelaida had abandoned him, going into details that any husband ought to have been too ashamed to reveal about his married life. The thing was that he seemed to enjoy and even feel flattered by playing the ludicrous role of the offended husband, embroidering on and embellishing the details of the offense. “One would think you had been promoted, Fyodor Pavlovich,” the scoffers used to say, “you’re so pleased despite all your woes!” 

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The narrator alludes to Ophelia, a character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while reflecting upon the young women of the previous, “romantic generation”: 

I once knew a young lady still of the last “romantic” generation who, after several years of enigmatic love for a certain gentleman [...] ended up, after inventing all sorts of insurmountable obstacles, by throwing herself on a stormy night into a rather deep and swift river from a high bank somewhat resembling a cliff, and perished there decidedly by her own caprice, only because she wanted to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Even then, if the cliff, chosen and cherished from long ago, had not been so picturesque, if it had been merely a flat, prosaic bank, the suicide might not have taken place at all.

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After a disastrous meeting with Zosima the elder, during which he acts in a buffoonish manner and slanders his eldest son, Fyodor decides to skip the planned dinner and return home, before changing his mind and deciding to stay. The narrator uses situational irony in depicting Fyodor’s thoughts at this critical moment: 

At the same moment he suddenly remembered being asked once before, at some point: “Why do you hate so-and-so so much?” And he had replied then, in a fit of his buffoonish impudence: “I’ll tell you why: he never did anything to me, it’s true, but I once did him a most shameless and nasty turn, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.” Remembering it now, he sniggered softly and maliciously, in a moment’s hesitation. His eyes gleamed, and his lips even trembled. “Since I’ve started it, I may as well finish it,” he decided suddenly.

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In a passage suffused with dramatic irony, Dmitri rejects the possibility that Fyodor was murdered by Smerdyakov: 

“I don’t know who or what person, the hand of heaven or Satan, but … not Smerdyakov!” Mitya snapped out resolutely. “But why do you maintain so firmly and with such insistence that he is not the one?” “From conviction. Not from impression. Because Smerdyakov is a man of the most abject nature and a coward. Not just a coward, but a conjunction of all cowardice in the world taken together, walking on two legs. He was born of a chicken [...] He’s a sickly, epileptic, feebleminded chicken, who could be thrashed by an eight-year-old boy."

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Dostoevsky uses situational irony in his depiction of Kolya, who is, for a period of time, bullied at school precisely because of his mother’s attempts to prevent bullying: 

When Kolya started going to school and then to our high school, his mother [...] threw herself into acquaintances with his teachers and their wives, was sweet even to Kolya’s schoolboy friends, fawning on them so that they would not touch Kolya, would not make fun of him or beat him. She went so far that the boys indeed began to make fun of him because of her and began teasing him for being a mama’s boy. But the lad knew how to stand up for himself. 

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