When, in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner is becalmed on his ship in the ocean in the tropics, thirsty for want of a drink of water, he is a victim of irony: ‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink’. He cannot relieve his thirst by drinking salt.
The RMS Titanic, billed as ‘unsinkable,’ hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sinks.
King Duncan in Shakespeare’s Macbeth is appalled at the Thane of Cawdor’s treachery. “He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust,” the king confides to Macbeth, blissfully unaware of Macbeth’s own intention to murder him when the opportunity presents itself. The audience, however, does know of it. This is an example of what is called dramatic irony.
In another case of dramatic irony, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus angrily denies that he is his father’s murderer, but he does not know who his father is. Teiresias the prophet, however, knows Oedipus has in fact killed a man unknown to him who would not let him pass at a crossroad. This man was, as Teiresias knows, Laius, the father of Oedipus.
In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth is saved from the threat of all-encompassing evil not by triumphant armies of the righteous, but by a humble modest hobbit whose success and bravery are quite unexpected.
To the Christian believer, God Almighty takes vulnerable human form, born humbly in a manger, then delivers the Good News of mankind’s salvation as an itinerant teacher before submitting Himself to unjustified death as a criminal in advance of His triumphant Resurrection.
In Herman Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd, Sailor, the popular, good-looking crew member Billy Budd kills the master-at-arms Claggart, who has mercilessly provoked him. Captain Vere, aware of Billy’s moral innocence and the extenuating circumstances of his crime, must render judgement, and he does: “Struck dead by an angel of God,” he famously declares. “Yet the angel must hang.”
In O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, a poor husband and wife each decide to buy the other a Christmas present. The husband receives from his wife an expensive chain for the watch he sold to buy his wife some decorative combs, while she had sold her hair to buy the chain for him.
In Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace, a poor woman borrows a necklace from a rich friend only to lose it. She borrows money to pay for its replacement, too ashamed to let her friend know of the loss. She and her husband work for ten years to pay off the loan, only to discover belatedly that the lost necklace was made of “paste,” and was consequently valueless.
The animals of George Orwell’s Animal Farm are brainwashed into thinking “Four legs good, two legs bad,” in order to demonize their former, two-legged, keepers, Men. Yet they lack the intelligence to see that they have been had when their new overlords, the pigs, begin to walk about on two legs, and train them to repeat robotically the new commandment: “Four legs good, two legs better!” Orwell uses irony here to satirize Soviet historical revisionism.
