Lamb to the Slaughter Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Lamb to the Slaughter - Essay Example The use of irony can easily captivate and excite us. Many a times in order to understand the moral of the story or the theme; it needs one to be able to recognize irony. There are multiple uses and examples of irony throughout this short story. One example is when Mary Maloney goes to the grocery store after she kills her husband; she acts as if nothing has happened and gives the grocery store clerk the idea that everything is fine. This is considered dramatic irony because the reader knows more about what’s taken place than some of the characters in the story. The clerk thinks Patrick is at home waiting for dinner, but we know he is dead. Another example is when the policemen are eating the leg of lamb and one says "Probably right under our very noses. What do you think, Jack? "(Dahl 9).This is dramatic irony because the weapon used to kill Patrick really is right under their noses. Yet they have obviously committed one of the worst errors possible in this crime scene, and lo st the pivotal evidence they would need to for finding the killer, they continue eating, assuming the leg of lamb could never be a weapon, while Mary Maloney is giggling in the other room. In other words, Dahl is trying to capture here, and the dramatic irony really catches the tone of the dark comedy. That makes the audience feel the ideas of a tragedy as something funny. Therefore, relating back to the overall picture of the piece of literate as a dark comedy. The conflict then begins to arise again as she creates an alibi and brings in the police to catch the murderer. There are two external conflicts in this story.