Double Facepalm

"In the mean time I took every precaution to defend my person, in case the fiend should openly attack me. I carried pistols and a dagger constantly about me, and was ever on the watch to prevent artifice; and by these means gained a greater degree of tranquility" (Frankenstein, 142).

But that tranquility was short lived, wasn't it?

Victor reflects upon the creature's haunting words, "I shall be with you on your wedding-night." And now that I see the quote right in front of my face, I realize I could have included it with my foreshadowing examples, but this example doesn't take much analysis to discover.

He believes that the creature will kill him, which he is surprisingly okay with -- "the prospect did not move me to fear" (123). Maybe it's not all that surprising if we consider Victor's wretched life. But he really worries about how Elizabeth would react, so he takes some precautions to make sure she'll be physically and emotionally safe. On Victor's wedding night, "I earnestly intreated her to retire," and he looked around for the creature. He wasn't anywhere to be found until the "shrill and dreadful scream" (144).

My small group decided today that this was an instance of situational irony. Victor expects the creature to murder him, and he expects that telling Elizabeth to leave him will help her, but in reality, the creature ends up going straight for Elizabeth. The creature doesn't want to injure or kill Victor; he wants to wound him emotionally, because that's where Victor is most vulnerable. (I predicted this last week, right? It might have been obvious, but I'm still going to glorify myself for that one!)

I ought to be thy Adam!

"My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed -- 'Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in  your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.'

As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed" (Frankenstein, 67-8).

The timing here is just hysterical.

This quote goes along with the idea of destiny throughout the story. No matter how much Victor tries to escape, fate has a monopoly on his life. I noticed this earlier when Victor temporarily abandons his scientific studies -- he says, "Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction" (23). Now, in chapter ten, Frankenstein might as well say, "Fates, if you really hate me this much, take away my happiness right . . . now!" So they did.

Victor believes that his only destiny is to be unhappy, which makes perfect sense considering the hell he's been through. He puts down the science books for a while, he returns to his family in Geneva, and he takes a little trip through the mountains after Justine's death, but his only happiness is ever temporary. We discussed in class how "nature vs. nurture" applies to the creature, that Victor believes the creature is evil by nature but the creature believes he is evil by nurture. I think we can apply the same idea to Victor. His natural qualities of curiosity and work ethic help elicit his "remorse" and "guilt" by this point in the story (61). Frankenstein presents a theme that I don't necessarily agree with, that destiny is unavoidable.

By the by, I haven't quite decided if the creature's eloquent rhetoric is a reversal of expectations or not. Perhaps there's no situational irony. Before Victor agrees to hear the creature's story, he calls him "vile insect," "abhorred monster," and "wretched devil" (68), but he has yet to say something like, "Hast thou seriously acquired thine mastery of language from the likes of three destitute neighbors? And as thou knowest all by means of observation, whence did you learn how to pee?" (Thanks to Louise for that thought-provoking notion.)

"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."

"Wait a minute -- the cat!"

"Then the man and his wife burst wildly into the garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it -- the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid [sic] and the weeping gardener -- into the house" ("Once upon a Time," 18).

That sentence is so good that I forgive the lack of Oxford comma (which doesn't happen very often). This is my kind of story. Situational irony arguably tops my list of favorite literary devices, and there's plenty of situational irony here I can talk about. About which . . . I can talk. Here we go!

The more this family and their neighbors upped their houses' security systems, the less safe the family and the neighbors actually were. "Under cover of the electronic harpies' discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players [what are those?], cameras and radios, jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whiskey in the cabinets or patio bars" (12). What gave the intruders this ability? Why, the burglar alarm systems, of course. People were so accustomed to frequent false alarms that intruders could easily break into homes during a frenzy of shrilling alarms.

Then, the family's little boy was reduced to a bleeding mass, and I'm not going to quote that part again. What was the direct cause of the boy's fate? Why, the family's new security wall, of course. Childlike curiosity led the boy into the trap intended not for him but for intruders. Here's a picture of a concentration camp fence, referenced in the story (16):

One of the more obvious situational ironies was the phrase "happily ever after" (9), which unfortunately no longer applied to the family after the story's conclusion.

Needless to say, it was THE CAT:

"Water, water, everywhere" but not a "drop to drink"

"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains" ("Ozymandias," 10-12).

This is irony of the situational variety. King Ozymandias is "mighty," "cold," and "wrinkled"; those conceptions of him have survived for centuries since he ruled Ancient Egypt. Simultaneously, the words on the pedestal recall Ozymandias's "mighty works"; those works are nowhere to be seen. We expect Ozymandias's mighty works to remain because of his aforementioned power and might, but instead, the sand around his crumbled statue is "boundless and bare" (13).

In Ozymandias's case, people remembered the "despair" of his cruel tyranny longer than his "mighty works" lasted. It's a nice reminder that though our attitudes are not exactly immortal, our material accomplishments are certainly more mortal.

So, I was reading the introduction to situational irony, and I came across the example "water, water, everywhere" but not a "drop to drink." Like what happened with Ozymandias, this is the opposite of what we would expect to happen. I felt pretty cool because I knew exactly where this reference originated -- in Hank Green's song "This is Not Harry Potter."

(There was some verbal irony in that last sentence.)

And All My Death Eaters

"The singing words mocked him derisively. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world . . .'" (Brave New World, 209).

Here, I believe John may be stuck with a case of situational irony. The civilized world Linda described to him isn't as appealing as he thought it would be. This quote is an effective representation of how important and powerful words are to John. Even if words aren't necessarily true, they can apply to any situation. Also, it helps accentuate John's hatred of the civilized world and segues nicely into his failed attempt to reform the world.

I applaud John for his initiative in this chapter. Usually, when people start a movement, they get followers -- you know, it would have been pretty tough for Voldemort without any Death Eaters. (Not that Voldemort succeeded in the end. He had a really good chance; only, he couldn't love.) But John knew that he couldn't get anyone to latch on to his ideas. He put himself out there, which was really the only thing he could do.