Previous
Similes
Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—The Girl’s Sweet Death:
The little match girl’s peaceful death at the end of the story is an example of situational irony. Despite the fact that the little girl has suffered so much throughout the story and slowly dies from exposure on the icy city streets (a typically agonizing experience), in an ironic twist, she ends her life in a state of peace and love. This is because her grandmother’s spirit visits her in a vision and takes her up to the stars to be reunited with God.
The end of the story is also an example of dramatic irony. This is because, when the little girl’s body is found the following morning, passersby only see the sadness in her death rather than the beauty. Readers, on the other hand, know the deeply spiritual nature of the girl’s death. The final lines of the story capture the two layers of irony:
In the cold morning the little girl was found. Her cheeks were red and she was smiling. She was dead. She had frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. […]
“She had been trying to warm herself,” people said. And no one knew the sweet visions she had seen, or in what glory she and her grandmother had passed into a truly new year.
The fact that the little girl was found “smiling” captures the situational irony of how joyful and at peace she was while freezing to death in the street. The narrator’s note about how the people who pass by her body were unaware of “the sweet visions she had seen, or in what glory she and her grandmother had passed” captures the dramatic irony in this moment. The pedestrians only see how the girl “had been trying to warm herself” with her matches, not knowing that she had successfully warmed herself by dying in a state of bliss.
Related Themes:
