The situational irony at the center of “The Californian’s Tale” is the fact that the narrator and readers all expect Henry’s wife to return home when Henry says that she will, only to learn at the end of the story that she disappeared 19 years earlier and hasn’t been heard from since. The irony comes across in the following passage as the narrator asks Tom, Joe, and Charley not to leave him alone to greet Henry’s wife (as Henry is asleep), and they explain the whole story to him:
Then they seemed preparing to leave; but I said: “Please don’t go, gentlemen. She won’t know me; I am a stranger.”
They glanced at each other. Then Joe said:
“She? Poor thing, she’s been dead nineteen years!”
“Dead?”
“That or worse.”
[…]
“And he lost his mind in consequence?”
“Never has been sane an hour since. But he only gets bad when that time of the year comes round. Then we begin to drop in here, three days before she’s due, to encourage him up, and ask if he’s heard from her.”
Here, the narrator displays the same shock at this ironic twist as readers, responding with the simple question, “Dead?” after Joe reveals the truth. Joe then goes on to admit that he and the other miners only pretend like they believe Henry’s wife is coming home in the days leading up to her supposed arrival, “drop[ping] in” and “encourag[ing]” Henry by asking if he’s heard from her yet.
The irony here helps readers to understand just how bleak these miners’ lives are. Henry’s beautiful wife and comforting cottage offered the narrator hope that beauty and nurturing feminine energy could exist even in their desolate and abandoned mining community, and here he must let go of said hope. Likewise, Henry—who the narrator considered a potential friend—is actually a madman who the narrator must now let go of as well.
