Irony

          Everyone has heard of the story of the boy who cried wolf.  The boy is in charge of watching for wolfs so that he can notify the town and protect the sheep.  The boy cries wolf each night when there is no wolf just for attention and when there finally is a wolf nobodies comes to help the boy.

          The story, the boy who cried wolf, and the short story, “A Prophets Hair,” by Salman Rushdie, are both stories that have irony.  In the story “A Prophets Hair,” there is an wealthy Islamic family of one son, one daughter, and a mother and father.  The family isn’t extremely religious until one day when the father stumbles upon a silver vial containing a hair of the prophet Muhammad.  The father then changes extremely, and starts to pray five times a day and expects the rest of his family to do the same, including reading two and half hours worth of verses from the Qur’an.

          After the father gets to the point where he is threatening to divorce his wife and has disowned his daughter, the son and daughter decide that the hair is what has brought them all their trouble and they need to get rid of it.  When they attempted to steal the hair and be rid from their lives the hair managed to wind up back with their father.  The family now thinks they are cursed and must hire someone else to steal the hair.

          Now is when the irony begins.  First the son tries to hire a thief to steal the hair.  When he is searching for a thief he gets robbed of the money he was going to use to pay the thief and he is nearly beaten to death ends up in a coma.  Next the daughter is more successful in hiring a thief, she says that she wrote a letter to her uncle, who is a policeman, that he will open if something happens to her.  She finds a ruthless thief that has four sons that he crippled when they where born so that they could be more successful beggars. 

When this thief arrives late at night to steal the hair the son who has been in a coma the whole time suddenly awakes and yells “THIEF THIEF THIEF,” only to die the moment he finishes yelling.  The thief manages to slip by unnoticed as the father grab a sword and runs out his bedroom.  The thief gets the hair and decides just to run and not collect is reward from the daughter.  As the father is searching for the thief he sees a shadow and thrusts his sword into its heart.  When he realized it was is daughter he throws himself onto the sword.  The wife ends up in an insane asylum, the thief gets shot buy the policeman uncle, and the thief’s children by a miracle from the hair are cured of there broken legs only to be worse of and make 75% less than what they did previously begging. 

The only person who didn’t suffer with a unfortunate fate was the blind wife of the thief because she was magically cured and could admire the beauty of the valley she lived in. 

Just like the irony in, the boy who cried wolf, teaches us a lesson, some people feel that things like irony and satire in stories and movies are used to help teach us a lesson.  Ironic stories can be funny, offensive, sad…  but they all seem to have a lesson behind their humor, to make you think about why you think it is funny or ironic.