preview

Irony In The Most Dangerous Game

Decent Essays

Irony and imagery are both important writing tools, used to guide the reader through the story while keeping them engaged and thinking about the story complexly. When used together successfully, the reader can walk away with something to think about, a new perspective on something they might have thought different about before. When considering this, I would argue that “The Most Dangerous Game,” is overall a better story than “The Necklace”.
In both stories, irony is used to to teach a lesson. In Richard Cowell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” he tells a story of a hunter who is put into the place of the hunted. At the beginning of the story the protagonist, Reinsford, boasts about the extravagant nature of hunting for sport. “The best sport in the world,” (Cowell, 1924, p. 54) is …show more content…

By the end Reinsford feels sympathy for the hunted, being able to relate to the animals directly. The irony used in this story is easily relatable to the reader, everyone at one point in time has had some sort of drastic change in opinion. Whether it is about something as relative as the quality of a story, or something considerably more important, like what makes something’s life important, we have all had that feeling. On the other hand, we have “The Necklace,” by Guy De Maupassant. Maupassant’s use of irony is less relatable and more comedic. He does this very well, “oh my poor Mathilde, but mine was only paste!” (Maupassant, 1884, p. 208) A punch line of sorts, a funny ending to a unfunny story. It is unexpected, and gets the reader to remember what has happened earlier in the story, but when looking for an overarching theme, the humor could

Get Access