Contents Of The Dead Man's Pockets Analysis

One evening, Tom Benecke the man who misplaced his priorities, decided to stay home and work while his wife went to the movies. As he walked back, from seeing her out the door, his most precious sheet of paper flew out the window. Fretfully, Benecke crawled out the window, handing off an eleven-story building to fetch the paper. Did he make it back in one piece? Did he plunge to his death? Did his wife make it back home unharmed? In this story “Contents of The Dead Man’s Pockets”, author Jack Finney uses satire, situational irony, and dramatic irony to show how on unimportant thing can come between you and someone who should be a higher priority, as Tom Benecke did with a little piece of paper. Jack Finney used satire in his short story

Additionally, Finney uses times of situational irony to lead readers into realizing how absurd circumstances may become when one’s priorities are misplaced. The possibility of Tom getting a promotion in the distant future is extremely slim and is totally not worth risking his wife Claire’s safety or healthy relationship. The audience notice’s Tom risking both when he allows Claire to walk at night alone in New York and when he crawled out the window to grab the important paper. Even though is Benecke lost the paper he could have lost his chance with some type of promotion, however, losing his life would completely obliterate it. Both the reader and Tom recognized this is when Tom is on the ledge starting to figure out that any second he could accidently end his life by one small step that was misplaced also, risking Claire’s financial stability. All it takes is being so close to losing everything, for Tom to see he risked is all. The audience sees this when Tom longing to get back into the apartment and his life, is that he never knew how important it was until he was in a very scary situation, he started to realized everything he taken for grant could be gone in under a second. Absolutely, as the reader laughs about how moronic people can cling unto a ledge seems, the danger of focusing on things that do not matter sinks in