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Definition of Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given situation, and that of the... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a... read full definition
Part 2: The Postman: Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Cross Country Running:
Desperate to keep his past under wraps, Jude protects himself with self-spun narratives. This evasiveness often results in dramatic irony, as when his roommates ask him about his legs. In Part 2, Chapter 1, he tiptoes around his friends’ questions:
"You could walk before?" asked Malcolm, as if he could not walk now. And this made him sad and embarrassed: what he considered walking, they apparently did not.
"Yes," he said, and then, because it was true, even if not the way they’d interpret it, he added, "I used to run cross-country."
"Oh, wow," said Malcolm. JB made a sympathetic grunting noise.
Only Willem, he noticed, said nothing. But he didn’t dare open his eyes to look at his expression.
As scraps of his past begin to surface, the reader realizes that Jude’s account of his damaged legs is not entirely true. He loses his ability to walk after suffering spinal and nerve damage, which may be just as much the inevitable result of his years of abuse. Among other things, Jude starves, contracts STDs, and gets chased by Dr. Traylor in a car. To explain that he was a former cross-country runner who suffered a “drunken driving accident” is to prop up a semblance of normalcy. JB and Malcolm will never be able to peer past his shroud of secrecy, though the reader does.
Jude’s white lies are far from the only instance in which fiction supplements—or even supplants—the facts. Over the course of the novel, he invents one explanation after the next, even as they grow ever more frightening and problematic. Games of wheelchair tennis and “accidental” burns populate his conversations as he deflects concern and shields his loved ones from the truth. Lying becomes both a mode of self-protection and self-destruction.
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