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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
The most conspicuous element of the style in The Once and Future King is its use of anachronisms. White regales in anachronisms, using them for comedy, descriptive imagery, rhetorical arguments, and a variety of other purposes. White's anachronisms usually are concepts, events, or people from the 1940s and 1950s that are inserted into the story by the narrator, or sometimes by Merlyn, whose backwards aging allows him to know the future as the narrator does. These anachronistic references include telegraphs, tanks, and "an Austrian [...] who plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos." There is often some comment from the narrator introducing the anachronism as a helpful analogy for the reader or as a simplifying gloss to shorten the story. These anachronisms are fundamental to the way that White constructs his version of the Arthurian world.
