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Situational Irony In O. Henry's The Ransom Of Red Chief

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O. Henry has a very unique writing style. Throughout his novels, he uses examples of situational irony and plot twists to make the reader more interested. The Ransom of Red Chief, After 20 Years, and The Gift of the Magi are only a few of the 14+ books in which he puts his creative thinking and writing skills to work and includes plot twists and situational irony. The Ransom of Red Chief is a story about 2 men who kidnap a little boy and ask for ransom money from the family in order to get him back. In the end, the family gets the boy back and asks the men for ransom money to take the boy off their hands. Situational irony is seen when the kidnappers end up paying the family for taking the little boy. The author states on page 1, "Just at the moment when I should have been abstracting the fifteen hundred dollars from the box under the tree, according to the original proposition, Bill was counting out two hundred …show more content…

After a very crazy night, the police officer calls a friend to arrest the fugitive, because he couldn't bring himself to do it himself. The irony in this story happens when they meet up 20 years later and end up on 2 different sides of the bars. As claimed by the author in the text on page 61, "I saw the face of the man wanted by Chicago cops. I didn’t want to arrest you myself. So I went and got another cop and sent him to do the job." Lastly, in The Gift of the Magi, a couple who try to buy each other Christmas gifts end up selling their most prized possession to pay for the other's gift. Only in this case, the gifts they buy are now considered useless because they sold what the gift was for. The plot twist in this story occurs when for example, the girl sells her hair to buy her husband a new band for his watch, but the husband sells his watch to buy his wife a hair

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