Irony as Narrative Tool in Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them and Wale Okediran’s After the Flood: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

The study decries violence in all its ramifications including that perpetrated by nature and its elements, or that inflicted on one another by the characters in the works, or that unleashed on the audience by the authors who appear to be insensitive to readers’ psychology in the fictionalization of violence. It argues that the relationship between art and reality is not imitation which argument the Baroque model sustains, but distortion. And the failure to realize this robs art of its intrinsic value and presents nearly one to one correspondence. The study is somewhat hypothetical and somewhat theoretical in its espousal of the technique of irony, stating that the two works in analysis are shrouded in ironies. It postures that irony has both literary and social functions. The literary function is demonstrated in open contrasting and antithetical phenomena, whereas the social function is manifest in social criticism in which it uses other devices, especially satire to accomplish. In the course of performing this second function, the study shows that the authors have deployed irony in these works to reveal hypocrisy in religious/ethnic ideologies, corruption and quackery, ignorance and primitiveness.