Use Of Situational Irony In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Multiple Levels of Meanings Irony. This is something authors to get their point across or have more than one meaning in their text. Authors want to be creative in their writing so they want their text to include multiple meanings. Shirley Jackson and Jonathan Swift use these methods to include multiple levels of meaning in their writing “The Lottery” and “A Modest Proposal”. “The lottery” is about a city that is participating in a lottery. The reader doesn’t know what the character gets when they win, but in the end if you “win” the lottery you get stoned to death. The second short story, “A Modest Proposal”, is about Swift giving solutions to the current problems in Ireland. He doesn’t give a reasonable response, but gives a solution about eating infants. In “The lottery” Shirley Jackson shows situational irony, and in “A Modest Proposal” Jonathan Swift uses satire to bring up the problems his country is facing. Shirley Jackson in the lottery uses situational irony to get her point across. For example, at the end the Tessie Hutchinson is the winner of the lottery, “‘It isn't fair,’ she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, ‘Come on, come on, everyone’”(Jackson 1).This is situational irony because the reader thinks that the winner of the lottery will get something good

Such as the solution he gives for the economic problems of Ireland, ‘“Supposing that one thousand families in this city, would be constant customers for infants flesh, besides others who might have it at merry meetings, particularly at weddings and christenings, I compute that Dublin would take off annually about twenty thousand carcasses”’ (Swift 1). Swift’s solution is so ridiculous it’s funny. His solution is to feed the children and once they get ripe they are fed to the rich. This makes no sense and isn’t ethical so he is obviously not giving a real answer to the