Comparing Dramatic Irony In Romeo And Juliet And Knives Out '

The Power of Dramatic Irony and Foreshadowing in ATTWN and Knives Out “She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead”. Alack the day!” exclaimed the Nurse after she laid her eyes upon Juliet’s deceased body in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. One of the most famous instances of dramatic irony, the literary device where the audience is aware of information the characters in the piece of literature are unaware of, this penultimate scene in Romeo and Juliet has struck awe in audiences for centuries when Juliet drinks a substance that supposedly kills her. All the characters in the story believe she is dead when we, as the audience, know she is alive. This sets up the iconic ending of both characters taking their lives, leaving audiences shocked, and

This is significant as it provides the audience with information that the characters in the movie are unaware of. Namely, in the scene where Marta is giving him his nightly medications, she believes she gives him the wrong dosage of medicine because she mixes up the two medications. This is a problem because, without an antidote, which Marta can’t find, Harlan is likely to die within a few minutes. Because of this, they devise a plan so that Marta won’t be framed for the murder, because her mother doesn’t have documents and will be deported if Marta is found guilty. Harlan slits his throat to frame the murder as a suicide and tells Marta to pretend to leave, then sneak back in to make it seem like Harlan is still alive, protecting her case (Johnson). This sets us numerous examples of dramatic irony later on in the movie because we as the audience know that Harlan was “killed” by Marta, so every confession and interrogation we see from Detective Benoit Blanc is ironic. Marta’s confessions are especially ironic because of her lie-induced vomiting, which makes every statement she makes to Benoit Blanc somewhat of a

In And Then There Were None, the recurring motif of the “Ten Little Indians” poem sets up every death and inherently foreshadows them multiple times throughout the story. For example, when Vera sees the poem framed in her room right at the start of the novel, she recognizes it as an “old nursery rhyme that she remembered from her childhood days,” and as depicted in the novel, grows weary of it as the events in the novel unfurl (Christie 33). In general, Christie’s use of dramatic irony and foreshadowing is more mysterious and evokes fear in the reader. There is so much the reader doesn’t know, and so many possibilities of what could’ve happened throughout the novel. Contrarily, in Knives Out, Johnson’s use of dramatic irony and foreshadowing is relatively evident to the reader, until the twist is revealed at the end. Furthermore, since Knives Out is a movie, the visual and auditory depictions of the character’s thoughts as they are being interviewed depict explicit irony in their