The excessive use of irony throughout World War I literature paints a colorful scheme of thoughtfulness and style. Paul Fussell gives one explanation in The Great War and Modern Memory by stating that the war itself is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends (7). Writers obviously realized the irony of war and in turn wrote in this style maybe not by intention, but because it was inescapable. Providing a feeling of sorrow and pity seems to motivate Siegfried Sassoon in his poem titled The Hero in which an officer tells a mother that her son was brave although in truthfulness he was a coward: For a while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyesHad shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,Because hed been so brave, her glorious boy.He thought how Jack, cold-footed, useless swine,Had panicked down the trench that night the mineWent up at Wicked Corner; how hed tried To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to careExcept that lonely woman with white hair (7).An underlying tone of the irony in this poem points that the soldiers are mere pawns in the war. That no one seemed to care allows Sassoon to radiate his own feelings of helplessness. Irony provides dramatization in Wilfred Owens writing. Vivid descriptiveness is a key by-product of this dramatization. In Insensibility Owen defines the use of irony often with one line: Happy are men who yet before they are killedCan let their veins run cold (Norton 164).As for the descriptiveness used by Owen he uses it best in Anthem for Doomed Youth:Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;And bugles calling for them from sad shires (165).Intere...
