Situational Irony In Stardust By Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman’s Stardust is not the typical fairytale that people every have gotten so used to hearing. Looking at how Gaiman somehow adheres to both Northrop Frye’s mythos of summer and winter, in addition to the strange cast of characters, and the unique setting of the novel; readers obtain an experience unparalleled to the classic fairytale. Gaiman follows all the rules of Vladimir Propp’s structure for a fairytale, but in an unconventional way. His heavy use of irony is what keeps the story interesting and sets it aside from other classic tales that have been told for so long.

Stardust follows the adventures of three sets of people along their journey to retrieve a fallen star. The first plot line is the typical boy who embarks on a journey

Audiences have been conditioned to think in a single mind and Gaiman knows this and challenges what the reader is expecting. The reader experiences what is known as situational irony. The characters, setting, and events in the novel stray from the standard and routine way of thinking (Shelly 776). The most prominent form if situational irony that readers pick up on in the novel is that the characters do not meet their standard archetypical functions. A pirate is expected to be gruesome, tough, and mean however our captain in the novel Stardust completely shatters these expectations. His name is Captain Johannes Alberic and he is actually a light hearted man who rather than stealing treasure, steals lightning out of the sky and sells it. The captain is just one of many characters that don’t not fit the ideal characters that we envision in this fairytale. When our main hero is found stranded in the sky by a pirate ship, readers are expecting conflict or some act of heroism and bravery that frees them form the grasp of an evil doer. Unexpectedly, the pirate captain is polite and chivalrous (Gaiman

The mythos of autumn is a transitional piece of literature that goes from “summer” into “winter.” Frye describes this as the genre of tragedy, in that there is a movement from the ideal world to the real world; likewise, the mythos of spring involves a movement from the ideal world back to the real world (Tyson 210). If genres are the seasons, then Stardust’s physical structure of the wall that divides the lands acts an equinox. When the hero of the tale, Tristian, crosses over the wall there is a shift in genre. When crossing from the land of Faerie back into the town of Wall, his intentions were to deliver a piece of the star to woman called Victoria and in return he’d get his “heart’s true desire.” So Tristian cuts a piece of silver hair from the star to bring her as proof that he found it. He is confident, but upon meeting with the beautiful Victoria- the lock of hair turns to a handful of stardust. It is now that Tristian realizes that the two world can never meet. When Tristian originally crossed over into the land of Faerie however, he life was then filled with color. This transition as aforementioned is referred to as the mythos of spring and it concerns itself with the genre of comedy (210). A comedy features a protagonist with real world problems, the villains of comedies are often absurd and humorous. One of the villains of Stardust is a band of prince’s