Theme Of Irony In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

“Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos” writes Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel in his third volume of the Athenaeum. Many can tell that irony is something of the opposite than what a reader expects it to be. Irony leads to chaos in the end of the stories, an angel arriving, a father who left his family, and a family getting murdered. Sherman Alexie’s “Because My Father Always Said He Was The Only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangles Banner’ At Woodstock,” Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children.” Although all three of the short stories are completely different from one another, they all …show more content…
To start with, the grandmother in the story tells her son Bailey that she does not want go on this vacation that is planned. O’Connor wrote the beginning of the story to make the audience believe that the family does not end up going on vacation because the grandmother tells them she does not want to go. When the audience finally reads more into the story, they find out that she tells the family she will go. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” (O’Connor 1). This is ironic because when the family finally talks to the grandmother, she agrees to actually go on the vacation. The second happening of irony is when the grandmother is talking to her son Bailey trying to show him that she does not want to go on vacation because the newspaper says that The Misfit is loose from the Federal Pen. The reader would expect that the family would not end up going because they all realize that The Misfit might just be where they end up going. What really happens in the story is they end up going on the vacation, when they stop somewhere they talk about this amazing house, so they all agree to go see it. The family is driving down the road when the grandmother jumps from her seat and makes the rest of the family freak out, when they car goes out of control and causes an accident. They …show more content…
Irony is a bundle of chaos and in all of the three short stories, all three authors make that present. In Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children” he writes a story that is ironically made for children and about an angel arriving to a town to help sick people. In Alexie’s “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix Play “The Star Spangled Banner” At Woodstock” he writes about how ironic the father is fighting battles by himself and making war and peace seem like there is nothing else in the world. In O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” he uses irony to show that sometimes people need to actually do what they say they are going to do and how someone cannot always do what people want to end up doing. Although these three short stories are the opposite from one and another, they all have the same kind of irony going through the