When the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies are rescued at the end of the novel, their rescuer, a naval officer, thinks they have been having harmless fun on the island. “I know,” he says, “Jolly good show. Like The Coral Island.” He doesn’t “know” what has been going on, but the reader does. The irony here is that there is no happy ending, as there is in R.M. Ballantyne’s children’s classic The Coral Island, on which Golding decided to base his realistic, modern version of the famous Victorian children’s story. The boys on this island resorted to fear and superstition, threats and brute force, and, horribly, even murder, during their stay there. Ralph, one of them, bursts into tears at the memory of all that all the survivors have lost…
During a peaceful march in St. Petersburg in 1905, led by Father Gapon, an Orthodox priest, unarmed demonstrators, bearing sacred icons and portraits of the Tsar, and singing “God save the Tsar,” were shot by the Tsarist Imperial Guard. Some 100 demonstrators were murdered.
The authorities wanted prisoners in their custody to be motivated by the virtue of hard work. Hence the inspiring words set up for them, “Arbeit Macht Frei” ( Work Makes You Free.) The guards at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, however, had a different understanding of this slogan. Pointing to the crematorium, they sniggered, “There is a path to freedom, but only through this chimney!” Yet both the authorities and the guards themselves served the same devil in Nazi extermination camps. In Bavaria’s Dachau, in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, in Poland’s Auschwitz, in Belgium’s Fort Breedonk, and also in Sachsenhausen, Himmler’s “Arbeit Macht Frei” meant prisoners were to be worked to death before they became ashes.
The Dutch evangelist Corrie ten Boom, interned with her sister in a Nazi concentration camp for hiding Jews wanted for extermination, hears her sister cry out upon seeing a Nazi guard bludgeon a helpless old Jewish woman to the ground with his rifle butt. “Oh, the poor man!” she protests. Many readers will think her sister’s sympathy misdirected: it is the guard’s victim who needs the sympathy, surely? Yes, says Corrie, of course, but the armed Nazi’s situation is worse: how twisted must the man be to assault so brutally a defenseless old woman due to die soon at the hands of her evil tormentors? The irony of the pronouncement by Corrie’s sister, who herself died in Ravensbruck concentration camp, is designed to focus attention on the endangered soul of the vicious guard…
There are, of course, many more instances of irony to be found in literature, as in life. Irony can be comic as well as tragic. The Canadian author William Bell received a letter from his young daughter complaining about her punishment for some minor misdemeanor. Her final damning indictment was “I hat you.” He responded to her rebuke with his reply, “I glove you,” thereby countering her anger unexpectedly with gentle humour and fatherly forgiveness.
Irony is not always, or even easily, understood. Perhaps Megan Bell did not at first understand her dad’s reply above, as she was then only a child. What baffles the uninitiated may privilege an elite of the knowledgeable, who may relish their status as “secret intimates” of the ironist, a relationship that the unenlightened cannot share, a characteristic that will be further explained in our next issue.
