In Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Solider’s Home” and John Gould’s short story “What You’re Ready For”, the use of irony relates to thematic insights about self-deception. Hemingway explains how having faced the horrors of war, soldiers like Krebs are unable to simply settle down into a regular life yet find themselves isolated from the society they risk their lives to protect resulting in a life full of lies. Gould presents a professor who shares motivational teachings of self-help and spiritual guide, however, he is the one to lose his life. Both characters act strong and hide their feelings by denying the reality of their lives resulting in situational irony, however, they do not share similar experiences that define who they are. Situational …show more content…
Throughout the story, Krebs keeps on lying to his sister that he will go watch her play baseball one day. The reader expects him not to go, but the last phrase states: "He would go over to the schoolyard and watch Helen play indoor baseball” (Hemingway 6). Krebs misleads people into believing that he is brave, however, he constantly feels The nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and the talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything. (Hemingway 2) Krebs not only lies to others, but he also starts to live a lie, a life he does not want for himself. Similarly to “Soldier’s Home”, the title “What You’re Ready For” is ironic because the professor convinces his audience that he is ready to live in the present because “the present is a gift” (Gould 244). Towards the ending, the professor chants “This moment is all you’ve got! Live it now! Live it as though it’s your last!” (Gould 245) Little does he know, a bullet is coming his way and today is actually his last. Throughout both stories, situational irony