realism, a claim dictated more by our contemporary tastes than by critical understanding.
One example of irony that goes beyond conventional limits is the put on, the facetious and bizarre event or discourse that all its apparent structure and intention we cannot interpret as either serious or conventionally satiric. The point of such nonevents is that they have no point: the most that one can do with them is to identify some general target toward which they direct and which
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often turns out to be, as in these instances, the mode of expression itself. Fragmentary, incongruous, indirect – terms like these point to the eclectic nature of irony and the paradoxical fact that the ironist, assuming the most independent of roles, is in fact the most dependent on the conventions of literature. Indeed, irony seems somehow parasitical, living on the other narrative patterns and drawing its sustenance from another value system, for there’s nothing in its abstract and negative vision that can, in itself, generate anything like a conventional pattern of action. The controlling metaphor in the ironic mode is the disappearance or dismemberment of the hero. Frye identifies the mode through a hero who is inferior in power and intelligence to us, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration or absurdity, but he adds that this is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.
The clownish or marginal figure does not escape the ironic world; he is simply and unceremoniously sent on his way. The central form of irony finds its antihero in the hero, the