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Flannery O’Connor: Isn’t it Ironic? a la Shmoop

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Many people are lacking a certain, critical nutrient.

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No, it isn’t calcium. Okay, yeah… protein’s good, too.

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But we’re actually referring to… a healthy sense of irony.

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Let’s see you pick up a bottle of that stuff at your local GNC.

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Some try to make up for it with snarkiness…

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…but snarkiness is to irony what aspartame is to sugar.

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Satisfying at first, but it leaves a bad aftertaste… and might cause medical issues.

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What we really need is 100%, grade-A irony.

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Flannery O’Connor’s stories are chock full of the stuff.

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Irony is ingestible in a variety of different ways… don’t worry, none of them are used

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as suppositories.

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First, we have verbal irony, where words mean the opposite of what they say.

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Like the phrase… a good man is hard to find.

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What exactly is a good man, anyway? And what if the people saying it aren’t even good

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themselves? Then there’s situational irony, when what

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happens is the opposite of what we expect. Flannery O’Connor’s work is a great source

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of dramatic irony, when the audience knows something the characters don’t.

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In fact, in today’s sound bite age, sometimes it feels like we’ve forgotten what irony

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is…

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We’re looking at you, Alanis.

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Some people today say we’re in an age of new irony.

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You might even call it the… Iron-y Age.

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But Flannery O’Connor wouldn’t recognize this so-called irony as the real thing.

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Although we’d love to hear what she’d have to say about Toddlers and Tiaras.

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She’d probably say that we now live in an age of snark: snide remarks that are cutting

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and malicious…

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…but don’t dig in deep to the essential nature of the world, as irony does.

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So what age do we live in?

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An age of new irony?

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An age of snark?

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The age of Aquarius? Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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