Irony In Sherman Alexe's Because My Father

“Humor is everywhere in that there’s irony in just about anything a human does” said Bill Nye. People, on incident, create ironies every day, from simply wearing a watch when your wrist hurts, to printing paper about saving the environment. Three prime examples of the many ironies of life: “Because my father always said he was the only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”. Although many of our readings are immensely different in plot and setting, they all still include many forms of irony.
In “Because My Father” by Sherman Alexie, many ironies are seen throughout the story, especially between the father and the rest of the characters. Immediately in the beginning of the story, the father is portrayed as

First of all, when Pelayo and his wife find an angel on their courtyard, the reader thinks of a pristine holy white being without a flaw which would awe the observers. Although it did awe its observers, the angel was not pristine, but dirty, with tattered wings, and was infected with vermin, such as ticks and fleas. “He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had” (Marquez 1). Although one would expect this Angel to be the perfect holy being they have heard of, he instead was the exact opposite, an old man who is dirty and fragile. At the near end of the story, after the family exploits the angel as much as possible for riches, one would think that this family would be overly grateful, and nurse the angel back to health with their newly made money, though instead they left the angel on the floor to rot, and offered no assistance to him whatsoever. “If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of Myrrh inside it every so often, it was not an homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one” (Marquez 3). Although one may expect all people with any decency to treat an angel with the utmost respect, this family did not, instead they treated him as a slave, who is used to make