Irony in Storytelling of Two Short Stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Story of an Hour"

Abstract

This paper is wholly designed to discuss the use of Irony in two famous classic short stories: Rip Van Winkle and The Story of an Hour. The two stories used Irony as a literary device in many positions to add a sense of humor and surprise in the reader's perception. Irony could take three shapes, as literature usually explains. Irony could be verbal, situational, or dramatic. Two types of these appeared in the two stories as literary devices and added a sense of weirdness and humor as expected when using Irony. Irony is widely applied as a useful literary device. This paper stresses the point that the two short stories, The Story of an Hour and Rip Van Winkle, use irony as a literary device. The paper used discourse analysis as a means to study Irony in the two stories. This paper depends on making a full survey of uses of irony in through different aspects. Subtitles are used separately to explain how examples of irony appeared in each short story. Content analysis was made to define each position of irony in the two stories. The conclusion explained that irony was used as a literary device and defined different positions of different types of irony in the two stories. Irony added a sense of humor and weirdness to the two stories and created excitement in Storytelling to prove its effectiveness as a literary device.