"And isn't it ironic?"

"'My brave little man!' she said with her eyes shining. 'It was God did it you were there. You were his guardian angel'" ("The Drunkard," 84).

Allow me to point out to the mother that only one page ago, this "guardian angel" was drunk on the streets threatening and cursing at old women (68-70). One of the questions in the book asks about the principal irony in the story, so I've come up with a list of possibilities. The irony in this story, if I'm not mistaken, is situational irony, and here are a few examples of that within the story:

• As I quoted previously, the mother praised her little boy for being "brave" and his father's "guardian angel," praise one wouldn't expect going to a boy who drank an entire glass of porter (34).
• The literal "drunkard" in the story is the father -- drinking is his "greatest weakness" (11) -- yet the only character who gets drunk in the story is a little boy (whose age is probably somewhere around ten as he is on the cusp of being able to look after his younger sibling -- 15).
• The little boy saved his father from drinking during the story by means of drinking himself. Not . . . drinking himself -- "himself" is not an object of the gerund in my last sentence.

To determine the main irony in "The Drunkard," I can probably combine the three situational ironies above into one grand ironic statement. The little boy in "The Drunkard" prevents his alcoholic father from drinking and wins the praise of his mother by drinking alcohol himself.

A lot of people -- including songwriters -- have trouble understanding irony, so I thought I might help with this quote from Hank Green: "Alanis Morissette, when you get a death row pardon two minutes too late, that is extremely unfortunate. It is not, however, ironic."