Irony And Allusions In The Ransom Of Red Chief

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What would you do if everything that you did in your life came out just like you wanted it to? However, life does not work like that due to something called irony. O. Henry's short story “The Ransom of Red Chief” is a high level of comedy that uses irony and allusions to convey the idea that sometimes things don't come out like we expect them to.
When someone mentions a kidnapping, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Something scary, a nerve wracking experience… A fun time playing games and camping out in the wild? O. Henry describes a story about two older men in need for money that kidnap the son of one of the richest men from around in return for two thousand dollars. However, this kidnapping is nothing what they expected it to be. “The kid was a freckle-face boy of ten, with bright red hair, and Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of the thousand dollars in a flash.” When they kidnap the boy, he does not want to go home because “[he does not] have any fun …show more content…

Bill clearly dislikes the boy and claims that he is driving him insane. “One more night with this kid will sned me to a bed in Bedlam.” Bedlam is one of the first mental facilities in London, it is also a very famous mental hospital in history. It makes sense why the author would add such clever allusion describing how Bill feels as if he is going insane. Another allusion would be when Red Chief throws “a rock the size of an egg [that] had caught Bill just behind his left ear.” The allusion comes from a biblical passage in which David, a young child ends up defeating a much bigger and older man, Goliath, by whirling a sling above his head. Just like it is described in The Ransom of Red Chief, “[j]ust then we heard a kind of war-whoop, such as David might have emitted when he knocked out the champion Goliath. It was a sling that Red Chief had pulled out of his pocked, and he was whirling it around his

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