Irony In 'The Big Sleep, Oedipus The King'

Irony, which is the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning, is placed throughout many stories and poems. There are many different forms of irony, dramatic irony, situational irony, and verbal irony. Although the most common and most frequent of the three is dramatic irony, all three are widely present in almost any story or drama that would be read.

The three stories that will be analyzed for their mass amounts of irony used are “The Big Sleep”, “Chinatown”, and “Oedipus the King”. All three stories have similarities in more way than that of just irony. They all could be classified under the “hard-boiled detective” type since the main character is a tough and cynical one.

In “The Big Sleep” one of the first and most prominent uses of irony is when Marlowe meets what seems to be a hopeless woman by the name of Carmen. Marlowe, befuddled by later finding out that she is quite the opposite, tries to exterminate all ties to her as he does not want to get caught up in the midst of it all. Later on, she exerts herself in a very provocative manner. Thus shy, collected, and reserved, Carmen is very forward and not so shy about her body at all. Marlowe walks into a home and Carmen is there, laying on the bed, fully nude with the camera out ready for photos to be taken. The irony here is at first the reader would not expect Carmon to be such a seductress because she seems sweet, innocent, and kind but come to find out she is quite the opposite.

As for “Oedipus the King”, irony is present, just in a different manor. The type of irony seen in this story is dramatic. The audience knows who the murderer of Laius his whereas Oedipus does not. This is mainly ironic because, in fact, Oedi...

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...ense. All four of those characteristics make up the basis of this genre. “The hard-boiled detective was created in the pages of Black Mask magazine in the early 1920s by Carroll John Daly, a largely forgotten hack. He was immediately followed by Dashiell Hammett, who brought real talent to the genre and gave it literary credentials” (Penzler). Daly also created one of the first series of private eye novels, topping Hammett as one of the most famous authors of that time. Not soon after, the author of “The Big Sleep”, Raymond Chandler, closely trails after Hammett in his novel writing becoming vastly popular. “Raymond Chandler followed Hammett with his immortal Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep and eight subsequent novels. As a pure writer whose use of simile and metaphor has never been equaled, Chandler remains one of the giants of 20thcentury literature” (Penzler).