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Definition of Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—A California Cult:
When Richard thinks back on his days in California and his transition to Vermont, he foreshadows his illicit activities at Hampden and hints at the situational irony at the heart of these activities:
This, I think, is pretty rough stuff. From the sound of it, had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction. I remember reading about Pythagoras around this time, and finding some of his ideas curiously appealing—wearing white garments, for instance, or abstaining from foods which have a soul. But instead I wound up on the East Coast.
Referring to journal entries that he wrote in California, Richard admits that he probably would have joined a cult had he not left for Hampden. The situational irony of this belief is that Richard effectively ends up joining a cult in Hampden by enrolling in Julian's Greek classes. Richard fled the cults of California only to drive himself deep into a tight-knit, exclusive, and sinister group tainted with murder.
This statement also offers the reader a hint towards his future, cultish life at Hampden: wearing nothing but bedsheets, being covered in blood, fasting for days at a time, ingesting "blackish water." All of these rituals that the Greek students partake in for the Dionysian ritual are parallel to the Pythagoras ideas that Richard used to find appealing.
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Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Bunny Remembered:
When news of Bunny's disappearance and subsequent death reach the students of Hampden college, chaos ensues. Students claim to have been friends with Bunny, and the college president praises Bunny's character, both of which are examples of irony:
People who had never once spoken to him suddenly remembered, with a pang of affection, having seen him throwing sticks to a dog or stealing tulips from a teacher’s garden. “He touched people’s lives,” said the college president, leaning forward to grip the podium with both his hands; and though he was to repeat the exact phrase, in the exact way, two months later at a memorial service for the freshman girl (who’d fared better with a single-edged razor blade than with the poison berries) it was, in Bunny’s case at least, strangely true. He did touch people’s lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way.
This passage is heavily lined with verbal irony, which can be seen through Richard's tone and use of sarcasm. It is ironic that Hampden students who did not even know Bunny personally mourned him profusely and “remembered” him with sudden "pang[s] of affection"—a phrase that drips with verbal irony as it lambastes these students for disingenuously exaggerating their connections with Bunny in order to cash in on the emotional drama of this moment. The students recall specific instances of Bunny doing something around campus, all of which are stories fabricated by the drama of hysteria. The college president's quote—“he touched people’s lives”—is an instance of situational irony, considering that Bunny was murdered by his own peers with justification. Although Bunny was making an impact on his friends' lives, the novel suggests that he was touching their lives a little too closely for comfort. Moreover, the mention of the freshman girl’s death heightens the irony and serves to undermine Bunny’s death. It is possible that diminishing the grandiosity of Bunny's death is Richard’s way of coping with his role in the murder.
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Explanation and Analysis—Bunny's Funeral:
When Henry is chosen to speak at Bunny's funeral, he picks out Bunny's favorite poem to share with the attendees, creating situational irony:
No one paid much attention to the final speaker, Henry himself, who went to the podium and read, inaudibly and without comment, a short poem by A. E. Housman. […]
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
Not only is there irony in the fact that Henry—Bunny’s murderer—is speaking at Bunny’s own funeral, but also in the melancholy poem that Henry reads. The first line mentions rue and a laden heart for the friends the poet once had. Both of these feelings are sentiments Henry does not possess for his late friend Bunny, who manipulated and aggravated him. It is even more ironic for Henry to recite this poem at the funeral, given that he is the person who took Bunny's life in the first place.
This scene also serves to further the cover-up of Bunny's murder. By going through the motions and acting as grieving friends, Henry and the others hope they can throw the federal investigators off their scent.
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