Literary Criticism | Please help me check this.

Based upon the short story "The Drunkard" by Frank O'Connor

Thesis statement: Ironic humor helps a writer convey a truth about the human experience by exposing some incongruity of a character's behavior or a societal tradition.

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Contents:

Introduction

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Drunken Irony

Many elements of humor exist within the many forms of communication that we humans use. While some more bitter elements do exist such as sarcasm and sardonic humour, the more widely accepted element of witty humor turns out to be ironic humor. It is this humor that Frank O’Connor decided to use to write the short story “The Drunkard”. Ironic humor helps a writer convey a truth about the human experience by exposing some incongruity of a character’s behavior or a societal tradition. In other words, Frank used irony to critique Mick’s alcoholism by laughing at the incongruous situation he had to deal with; that being his son becoming drunk. Many more examples exist however,

In the short story “The Drunkard”, written by Frank O’Connor, irony is used to criticize Mick’s dirty alcohol habits. Frank O’Connor achieved this by creating an incongruous situation of the son becoming drunk rather than the father. In “The Drunkard” it states, “I found if I stood on tiptoe I could just reach Father’s glass, and the idea occurred to me that it would be interesting to know what the contents were like. He had this back to it and wouldn’t notice. I took down the glass and sipped cautiously. It was a terrible disappointment. I was astonished that he could even drink such stuff. It looked as if he had never tried lemonade.” By putting Mick in this situation, Frank wanted to critique Mick on the alcohol he so dearly abuses. It is ironic, however, that it was the son who became the drunkard, and not the father. The truth about alcoholism is that it is messy, gross, and never a pleasant sight. The father witnessed this from a different perspective, hopefully realizing that his son’s drunken action mirror his own. This prompts the reader to focus on the humor supplied by the inadvertent drunkard, Larry, or on the irresponsibility of the more habitual drunkard, Mick, who pays for his dirty drinking habits by selling off everything in the house down to the kitchen clock. As the grown Larry ruefully remembers, “I could never get over the lonesomeness of the kitchen without a clock.” The son also had ironic moments of his own. In “The Drunkard”, it states “But the next morning, when he got up and went out quietly to work with his dinner-basket, Mother threw herself on me in the bed and kissed me. It seemed it was all my doing, and I was being given a holiday till my eye got better.”(O’Connor 351) It turns out that even Larry had an ironic ending. The author made the situation seem as if Larry himself was going to be punished. Instead, he was hailed as a hero by his mother. This is obviously ironic because the child went out and got drunk the other night. Readers could safely assume that he would be severely punished along with his father. Because the situation got the father to go to work the next morning, the mother decided against any form of punishment, branding Larry as a hero. The last example of the use of irony to critique the situation was during the walk home. In “The Drunkard”, it states “I saw plain enough that, coaxed by the sunlight, every woman old and young in Blarney Lane was leaning over her half-door or sitting on her doorstep. They all stopped gabbling to gape at the strange spectacle of two sober, middle-aged men bringing home a drunken small boy with a cut over his eye.” The reader was there at the scene of what happened, and understand the full scope of the situation. The individuals occupying the street do not, however. It is made to seem that Mick and his friend purposely decided to get Larry drunk. The citizens on the street, whom usually witness the drunkenness of Mick, stand in awe as they witness the mere child drunkenly walking about the streets. The irony comes from the citizens, who again, usually witness Mick down his walk of shame home. It is now Larry doing this walking, humorously critiquing Mick’s usual walk of shame, creating a mirror like image. Larry is behaving like Mick usually does, and Mick is seeing this through a new light.