Is He Serious? And Other Ironies By Catrina Kennedy

Irony trumps EVERYTHING When you read a story about a path or a road, your first thought would automatically be someone or something will travel down that road. Waiting for Godot by Beckett portrays a meaning of waiting for someone that will never come. It’s about two men waiting beside a road for Godot to show up so they can walk the road together but he never shows. So why is there a road if they never engage to take it?

Irony? Foster describes two men wanting change but only understanding the road they wait on. They are waiting for the road to make the move, and we can see they were blinded to the reality of what was really going on. That is when we expect them to go down the road but instead we scream “go!” or “move do something!”.

A Farewell by George Peele is about soldiers being called to war. The first two words are “To arms!”, so Hemingway took this phrase and made a similar novel called A Farewell to Arms. However, the meaning to this novel is very different then you would expect. As Foster explains it “rather than a child and mother living for each other, as experience has taught us today, slay each other,”. The baby gets choked by the mothers umbilical cord, and the mother has many series of hemorrhages.

They say seatbelts save lives, but is that really true? For example, Foster talks about a man who crashed into a billboard and unfortunately dies because he was unable to get his seatbelt off in time to get out of his car before the billboard toppled on top of him.

Foster then explains how people turn out to be the exact opposite of what you thought. For example, a princess held in a tower waiting for her prince charming, turns out to be rude, selfish, and a murderer.

For us to cherish good in the world then evil must exist. You always be tempted to choose evil, if you choose evil then your free-will will be taken from you.

Irony for some writers is a very difficult thing to understand, and for others maybe not. Like Foster says “How do you know if it’s irony? Listen.”