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Setting
Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Some Aren't Sinners!:
Situational irony is used in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” to demonstrate the cruelty and impartiality of fate, which makes bad things happen to good people and vice versa seemingly randomly. A clear example of situational irony occurs when the reader is introduced to a pair of “lovers” who join the party on their journey across the ridge. These two new members of the band of "outcasts" haven't been exiled from Poker Flat at all. They are a young couple, the "Innocent" Tom Simson and the 15-year-old Piney Woods, who approach the group looking for company on their journey to elope, and decide to join them when they discover that Tom knows Oakhurst from a previous encounter:
There was a remembrance of this in his boyish and enthusiastic greeting [...] He had started, he said, to go to Poker Flat to seek his fortune. "Alone?" No, not exactly alone; in fact (a giggle), he had run away with Piney Woods. Didn't Mr. Oakhurst remember Piney? [...] they had run away, and were going to Poker Flat to be married, and here they were. And they were tired out, and how lucky it was they had found a place to camp, and company.
The reader can sense the irony in their joining the outcasts almost instantly, as the story has previously repeated the fact that the outcasts are beset with “bad luck,” and Tom and Piney insist that it is “good luck” to have found them. Tom's innocence is emphasized by the narrator with the use of childlike language: he is "boyish and enthusiastic," and rather than just laughing, he "giggles." Mr. Oakhurst has a faint premonition that the “situation [is] not fortunate,” but fails to persuade Tom and Piney not to stay. The couple don't even know they have joined a band of "outcasts" at first.
The irony that Tom and Piney are not actually “outcasts” is made even sharper by the way Piney dies. After Tom leaves for supplies, Piney attempts to survive but ultimately succumbs with the rest of the party. Ironically, the relative innocence of the couple has ceased to matter in the face of overwhelming bad luck—they die separated and frozen like all the other members of the group. Although they aren't "outcasts," Tom and Piney live with them and die like them, further blurring the line between morality and sin in this short story.
Related Themes:
