Us and Them Essay

The story of “Us and Them” consists of three types of irony: situational, dramatic, and verbal. These types make the story more interesting as a reader. Irony can be used in the sense of tricking the reader into one thing happening, but a completely other event takes place. This keeps the reader intrigued and is excited to see what happens next due to the fact that nothing is predictable.

In the story, the child uses a variety of irony, an example of dramatic irony is when Sedaris is spying on the Tomkeys and they are not aware of this. This is an example of dramatic irony because the author of the story knows something that the characters don’t. This can entertain the readers by going into the Tomkeys lives without them knowing it.

The second type of irony is situational, an example in the story is when the Tomkeys show up at the Sedaris’s house a day after Halloween, the author’s mom makes him and his sisters go get their candy wanting not to be rude, the author starts rating the candy, rating from best to least. After a couple minutes of stalling, his mother barges into his room and starts gathering the candy herself, he starts to stuff his face with the chocolate where he has mentioned before that he gets bad headaches from this candy.

This is a type of situational irony because you would not have expected Sedaris to eat the candy that would make him have a terrible headache just so that the Tomkeys couldn’t have it. The third type of irony is verbal, an example in the story is when the author’s mother tells him to look at himself, the reader would probably expect something else as in a mirror, but the author actually takes a moment to reflect on his behavior and look at how he has acted toward the Tomkeys all because they don’t watch TV.

This is a good example of verbal irony because this keeps the reader entertained by seeing a new side of the author thats not completely indulged in the Tomkeys’s lives. All of these different types of irony can make almost any story interesting and hard to put down, the reader may find it intriguing to expect one thing and completely have another event take place. In this story you will get three different types of irony all at different points in the story, so never will the story be a boring read.