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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 6: North Carolina
Explanation and Analysis—The Freedom Trail:
In The Underground Railroad, irony often runs parallel to myth and undercuts self-comforting fictions in the process. Upon her arrival in North Carolina, Cora stumbles across a gruesome display of violence that exposes the horrific incongruence between reality and ideal:
"The road," Cora said, "the Freedom Trail, you called it. How far does it go?"
It extended as far as there were bodies to feed it, Martin said. Putrefying bodies, bodies consumed by carrion eaters were constantly replaced, but the heading always advanced.
The naming of the Freedom Trail—a country road decorated with lynched Black bodies—is deliberately ironic. With its dead, rotting corpses of captured Black victims, the trail is clearly a symbol of anything but freedom. The Freedom Trail exposes a cruel dissonance: its name pays lip service to high-minded principles even though the road itself represents the exact opposite. This visceral, painful irony adds a sense of grotesque horror to the town’s weekly gatherings. In making such a travesty of freedom, the trail invites the reader to reflect upon racism’s irrational, unreasonable inhumanities.
Thematically, the road draws attention to the contradictions underpinning the nation’s very existence. The Freedom Trail builds upon the novel’s complex portrait of America, a country founded upon a belief in equality but also reliant upon race-based slave labor. Documents like the Declaration of Independence boldly proclaim liberty throughout the story, though Cora’s experiences—like those of millions of others—time and again attest to the opposite. The Freedom Trail warns the reader that, left unaddressed, such contradictions could cause America’s professed values to decay like the hanging bodies themselves.
Related Themes:
Chapter 11: Mabel
Explanation and Analysis—Cursed Snake:
In the novel’s final chapters, the story yields one of its most powerful moments of dramatic irony as it turns to Mabel’s escape and reveals her tragic end to readers, though Cora never finds out:
The snake found her not long into her return. She was wending through a cluster of stiff reeds when she disturbed its rest. The cottonmouth bit her twice, in the calf and deep in the meat of her thigh. No sound but pain. Mabel refused to believe it. It was a water snake, it had to be. Ornery but harmless. When her mouth went minty and her leg tingled, she knew. She made it another mile. She had dropped her sack along the way, lost her course in the black water. She could have made it farther—working Randall land had made her strong, strong in body if nothing else—but she stumbled onto a bed of soft moss and it felt right. She said, Here, and the swamp swallowed her up.
This unexpected death dramatically changes the narrative. Mabel’s attempted escape, after all, has been the source of Cora’s vengeance the whole while. For Cora, her mother’s apparent act of abandonment becomes a source of burning curiosity and itching resentment: she imagines kicking Mabel’s “beggar cup” at the same time that she asks Ms. Lucy of her whereabouts. Her resentment towards Mabel even leads Ridgeway to observe that it is one of the only interests they share in common.
The crucial irony of this moment is that Mabel never escapes. She is not in Canada, as Ridgeway suspects, and neither does she savor the idyllic freedom that Cora fantasizes about. Instead, the novel’s flashback to the night of Mabel’s escape shows the opposite: she tantalizingly reaches the doorstep of a successful runaway attempt, only to fail in the very end.
The scene is also ironic in revising Mabel’s perceived selfishness with maternal love. Mabel actually reverses course in the swamp, hoping to reunite with her daughter by daybreak and help Cora realize freedom someday. But almost like the Middle Passage, Mabel dies in a space caught between escape and return. She won’t find the “words” to share her thoughts with Cora, just as Cora won’t find any name in the contact book. The Underground Railroad ends with the agony that neither mother nor daughter will ever know the truth; only the reader does.
Related Themes:
