gmiades
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I love English Class
Posts: 10
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Post by gmiades on Sept 25, 2015 0:59:48 GMT
Irony was incredibly abundant in the short story "The Interlopers." From the title to the end of the story, irony was the most significant literary device in the story due to how common it was throughout the story.
The title, whether the reader picked this up before or after reading, was one of the most important uses of irony. As we already know, Ulrich and Greog had come to an agreement to become friends, with "no interlopers from outside" as Georg said. Interlopers, by definition, are people who are not wanted or welcome by other people in a situation or place. In their very unfortunate case, the interlopers arrived, and they were killers. The irony here is the fact that moments after they had made a pact of friendship with no interlopers, the interlopers came, and ended the whopping 15-minute relationship between the two men. This is where another large piece of irony is unburied. Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym were both being interlopers to each other. In this situation, they each saw their foe as a person who is not wanted or welcome in a situation or place.
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Post by Zack Brown on Sept 25, 2015 2:38:58 GMT
While you explained the verbal irony in the title of the story, what is more abundantly clear to me is the situational irony throughout. This irony begins at the very start of the short story, where Georg and Ulrich are in the forest hunting each other. This situation leads to the belief that one man will eventually kill the other when ,in fact, the story has another fate in mind for the two. Whilst hunting one another, they come close enough for one to kill the other when a tree falls and pins both. This completely contrasts how the story began, turning man versus man into man versus nature. If thinking of deeper meaning while reading this, instead of face value, one might say the tree represents knowledge or truth. This is true if you assume the theme to be one of grudges and their pointlessness. The tree crushes the two men whose families have been feuding for centuries, and forces them to get to know one another beyond the preconceived biases given to them by their families. In terms of real life application, this situation proves the idea that one must come to their own conclusions, not judging a book by its proverbial cover, to put it in cliche terms. All of this deeper meaning is wrapped inside this seemingly simple instance of irony in the story which drives the main plot along. The second happenstance of situational irony is in the expectations of the men on whose party will find the two and rescue their fellow man, leading the second to die with no consequence to the other. Once again, the thought is that one of these two obvious choices will occur, one man of the other, but once again, Saki tricks the reader with irony. The approaching party is found to be wolves, hunting out in the forest with Georg and Ulrich. Tying back to theme, this situation uses the wolves as symbols for consequence. If the two men had simply talked to each other pre-hunt to the death, this situation would never have occurred in the first place, showing the grudge and prejudice towards each other to prove unhealthy, both mentally and in physical health(i.e. not dying to wolves.)
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