What are examples of irony in novels?

Question

Are there examples of irony in any Sidney Sheldon book?

Answer 1

Hi,

I can give you an example of a writer using irony:

There was a famous short story written by O. Henry called The Gift of the Magi.

In the story, The Gift of the Magi, there's a young wife who has only $1.87, and she wants to buy a gift for her husband. Christmas is the next day. She hasn't bought him anything. She only has $1.87.

So, she makes a critical decision. She decides to cut off her beautiful long hair in order to sell the hair to get the money to buy her husband a Christmas present.

While she's making that critical decision, her husband is making a decision as well about buying her a Christmas present.

She wants to buy him a chain for his watch. I think it was a very special watch given to him by his grandfather. That's why she's cut off her hair. He decides to sell his watch to buy beautiful, expensive combs for her lovely long hair.

You see what happened there? Each of them wanted to do something special for the other. They just didn't tell each other what they were doing. That was the irony.

Hope that helps. Have a nice day :)

Answer 2

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that “more” and of the outsider’s incomprehension.

Irony has some of its foundation in the onlooker’s perception of paradox. The reader’s perception of a disconnection between common expectation, and the application of logic with an unexpected outcome, both has an element of irony in it and shows the connection between irony and humor, when the surprise startles us into laughter. Not all irony is humorous: “grim irony” and “stark irony” are familiar.

Metafiction is a kind of fiction which self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It usually involves irony and is self-reflective. Metafiction (or “romantic irony” in the sense of roman the prose fiction) refers to the effect when a story is interrupted to remind the audience or reader that it is really only a story. Examples include Henry Fielding’s interruptions of the storyline to comment on what has happened, or J.M. Barrie’s similar interjections in his book, Peter Pan. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events could also be considered a form of romantic irony, in which the action is frequently halted for a warning that the events to follow could be potentially distressing. The concept is also explored in a philosophical context in Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder. A similar example occurs in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novel where the narrator reveals in advance “in the interest of reducing stress” that nobody will get hurt by a pair of incoming nuclear warheads, but that he will leave some suspense by stating that he would not reveal whose upper arm would get bruised in the process.

Answer 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony

1) A typical use of irony of fate occurs in the climax of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Frollo, the villain, stands upon a gargoyle. He raises his sword to strike Esmeralda, and says, “And He shall smite the wicked and plunge them into the fiery pit!” At that moment, the gargoyle breaks off, sending Frollo falling to his death into the courtyard, filled with molten lead that Quasimodo had spilled to stop the oncoming guards. The irony is that Frollo’s line is used in reference to Esmeralda, but instead it winds up applying to Frollo himself as he plunges into the fiery pit of molten lead.

2) Another example: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925;
It is Nick, the middle-class everyman without particular allegiance to either the privileged or working class, who has enough objectivity to comprehend the awful irony that Gatsby's dream has been futile from the beginning: he will never be accepted into the world of old money that Daisy could never leave.

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/gatsby.htm

Nick as main character. As a coming of age story, Nick’s narrative is about his realization of just how deeply implicated his story is in Gatsby’s story. Nick learns in the end that the very idea of realizing his self in the mythic American dream landscape of the East (the city as an urban wilderness of possibilities once occupied by the West in American consciousness), that this future was already gone long before he headed east in the spring of 1922 to make his mark in the bond market. This is also (or still) a story about loss, but perhaps one that is more deeply ironic, more detached, more explicitly literary in its stylistic expressions of melancholy lyricism. The structure of the story and its non-chronological progression tends to emphasize Nick’s consciousness and the contrast between Gatsby’s belief in the green light and Nick’s introduction to the modern realities he comes to see lying beneath the glittering surfaces of such symbols.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~jazale/project/symbol.html