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Definition of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging outside and someone remarks "what... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean... read full definition
Book II, Chapter 21
Explanation and Analysis—Apartheid Oppression:
Arthur Jarvis airs South Africa’s ironies in his writings and speeches. As James Jarvis rifles through his dead son’s essays in Chapter 21, the novel shares a diagnosis of a country plagued by impossible contradictions—a diagnosis that makes use of verbal irony:
We believe in the brotherhood of man, but we do not want it in Africa. We believe that God endows men with diverse gifts, and that human life depends for its fullness on their employment and enjoyment, but we are afraid to explore this belief too deeply. We believe in help for the underdog, but we want him to stay under.
Arthur Jarvis’s unfinished speech criticizes the senseless hypocrisy embedded within the country’s moral fabric. It attacks a “Christian civilization” that pays lip service to godly fraternity but crushes others in the very same breath. It exposes the failings of a country whose faith in a benevolent God is fundamentally at odds with its merciless treatment of its native population. The public figure reaches for the very heart of the country’s problems, articulating what Kumalo had struggled to pinpoint. His writings read like a mouthpiece for the author himself, bringing clarity to the mines, slums, and segregated buses that fill the novel’s peripheries. In condemning a country that does not practice what it preaches, he takes down the creaking, performative edifice of white morality.
Related Themes:
