A Little Life: Irony 4 key examples

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.

This strangely dissociative moment spotlights a surprising result of Jude’s self-loathing. Staring at his own image, he “no longer felt anything for that person.” Ironically enough, though, this absence of self-recognition stems from Jude’s own hyperawareness.

Jude is so crippled by his own personal imperfections that he loses himself entirely. Self-loathing consumes his life: he tortures himself over his presentation to Harold, crafts bland alter egos, and loathes his own broken body. In an ironic way, then, Jude’s efforts at concealment require paying attention to himself. One can’t pretend to ignore someone without being able to “see them day after day” to begin with. One can’t train a “conscious act of will” without first identifying a target. Jude’s psychological experience shows the line that separates self-consciousness from self-denial, and how one becomes the other once taken to its extremes.

The novel underscores Jude’s struggle for forgiveness by likening words to “stones,” a comparison that vaguely recalls biblical parables. To “cast the stone” at someone is to deliver criticism or judgment too rashly. Extended by Jesus as a challenge to the Pharisees who sought to punish an adulterous woman, it is a caution against condemning others before examining the faults within oneself.

But all of this takes a somewhat ironic twist in the context of Jude’s circumstances—his reluctance to forgive inverts the usual connotations of “stones.” In this instance, stones are not words of reproach but of forgiveness. Where the Pharisees punished by throwing the stones, Jude does so by refusing to lift them off his tongue. The stones in this excerpt underscore his tight-lipped reservations rather than any kind of moral generosity. Weighed down by his own pile of stones, Jude burdens himself with his past. The novel’s suffering main character cannot let go of festering resentment any more than personal trauma.

In this moment of fretful perplexity, Harold reveals the irony of Jude’s abusive relationship with Caleb. Just pages earlier, he had celebrated his son for his aggressive litigation and mental agility. Harold recounts an episode in which Jude had grilled a whistleblower in court and lingers over his son’s “brutal” coldness. Here, though, he retraces the moment when he finds Jude crumpled at the bottom of the stairs and spattered in his own blood. The fierce, feared litigator—“so relentless, so dogged, so pointed”—is suddenly, ironically, so powerless and vulnerable.

Harold’s discovery comes as no surprise to the reader, who has witnessed Jude’s dualities throughout the novel. But he rightly observes that “I have never met anyone as neatly or severely bifurcated as he.” Jude is both the violated child and law firm partner. He is the sex worker and a movie star’s lover, a victim of unimaginable tragedy and a beneficiary of great luck, too. For the first time, Harold sees his son in his many contradictions.