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Story Of An Hour Situational Irony Essay

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¨Richards was to late. When the doctors came they said she died of heart disease - of joy that kills.¨ This is an expert from the Kate Chopin story The Story of an Hour. The plot to the story is one of massive irony. A woman is told that her husband has died in a train accident. Instead of doing what is expected she is happy to hear that he has died. She proceeds to have this joy and she adopts a new look on the world, one of freedom. In a twist ending her husband shows up to her house, not dead and completely unaware that there was even an accident. The wife, Mrs. Mallard then dies of shock that he hasn’t died. There are two types of irony in the story, situational and dramatic. Situational irony is when something in the story happens that was expected to go another way. It can be used to shock the when it happens and the reader had no idea it was going to.One example of this is when she is happy to find out her husband had died. The reader should have expected to have her be sad. It was also used when we find out that Mr. Mallard is alive, rather than dead, and Mrs. Mallard dies instead of rejoicing. This irony is important to the story because it progress the plot in an unexpected way. It pulls the reader in …show more content…

Mrs. Mallard might not have even died. Although this isn’t even the only type of irony in the story. The other irony is dramatic. This is when the reader of the story knowns something that the characters don’t. This is used throughout all of The Story of an Hour. The reader knows that Mrs. Mallard is not sad that her husband is presumably dead, but she is instead happy. The other characters, such as her sister Josephine, assume that she is extremely sad or even depressed. This type of irony is again used in the resolution of the story when Mrs. Mallard dies. The doctors think that she has died from her heart issue, which she did infact do, however they think it her heart failed due to too much

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