The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Dramatic Irony 3 key examples

It takes two to make an accident as baldly comic as this one, and the novel uses double dramatic irony to pull off the tableau. Quasimodo fails to hear the judge’s questions and offers his name when asked to provide details about his crime. Maître Florian is no better. Having compensated for his hearing loss by memorizing case details, he rattles off his canned questions when Quasimodo has not even replied. “Have you written down what the defendant has said so far?” he asks the clerk, oblivious to Quasimodo’s silence. Neither character actually knows what is happening, bumbling along in a way that only exposes their flimsy performances. Judge and criminal trade non sequiturs or respond senselessly to each another until the audience breaks out in laughter. The humor ultimately comes at Quasimodo’s expense—the judge increases his punishment for his improper responses, earning an extra hour at the pillory. He becomes the butt of a spectacle that offers the attendees and reader a good laugh.

The scene pairs the unrealistically innocent with the careless and worldly. Phoebus pledges his love to the enamored Esmeralda, who falls for him. To the reader, though, his declarations only expose the pair’s conflicting priorities and values. Esmeralda—who seeks in Phoebus something akin to salvation—takes these promises literally. “God!” she cries when Gringoire explains the classical origins of Phoebus’s name. “Phoebus’s life was everything,” she later thinks to herself in asylum. Yet these words of devotion mean far less to the philandering soldier himself, who recites them merely as buzzwords for sex. He loves Esmeralda “truly, miraculously,” but sees her for little more than the sensual pleasure she provides. He flinches at the prospect of a long-term relationship and Esmeralda’s demands for religious instruction. “Marriage is nothing!” he waves away when she suggests marriage. Esmeralda sees protection and redemption in Phoebus’s gallant figure. The soldier, by contrast, merely sees in her an opportunity for extra kisses.

The novel exploits the priest’s ignorance to quasi-comic effect. The reader knows of Quasimodo’s valiant rescue attempt that places Esmeralda in asylum. Claude Frollo does not, assuming instead that she has already been executed. The result is that the priest watches the object of his flaming desires drift right before his eyes, only to dismiss it as a specter. He fails to recognize the very lady he lusts over.

His hallucinations also speak to the maddened state in which he finds himself. Claude Frollo has just returned to the cathedral after a flight away from the city, haunted by the combination of his own guilt and sadistic fantasies. Stewing in his dreadful thoughts, he gathers the fruits of his “vitiated love” and flees “from nature, from life, from himself, from God, from everything.” In this mind untethered from sanity, ghosts make more sense than human bodies. Claude Frollo later discovers that Esmeralda survives, and his passions rekindle with redoubled, savage intensity. In this moment, though, he already surrenders his grip on reality.