Irony in "There Was Once"

Irony in “There Was Once”


The use of irony in the story “There Was Once” is the form of irony that we call verbal irony. It is basically about two people who bicker and complain about the use of cliches in a fairy tale story. It is a statement, really, about how much writers have come to rely on cliches, and how people have become brainwashed by them pretty much. Our story starts out with the first person telling a certain story. It begins, “There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.” (Pg. 537) This one sentence is FULL of things that we have all heard before. Almost every fairy tale that we have heard has started out like this, and contains characters who are beautiful, poor, and conflicted. They all have evil stepmothers, or there are witches, and they all find happiness in the end. So not like real life, but that’s the way it goes with most stories. “There Was Once” goes on, and...