The Art Of Irony In A Frolic Of His Own

William Gaddis is a post-modernism American novelist, whose literary works areconsidered as hard to read. A Frolic of His Own was his long-anticipated fourth noveland won the National Book Award in1994. A Frolic of His Own (1994) focuses onOliver Crease, his family, his friends, and the various lawsuits in which they are allenmeshed. Employing elements of humor and farce, Gaddis exhaustively details theabsurdities of his characters’ suits and subsequent countersuits. Irony is used as anartistic technique in the fiction and it will be a worthwhile attempt to survey the ironiesin the work. So the thesis intends to examine ironies in the novel, discussing the verbalirony and situation irony, and its aesthetics value in spiritual orientation.The thesis consists of six sections: The Introduction includes the generaldescriptions of William Gaddis’s lifetime and his novel A Frolic of His Own. ChapterOne places special emphasis on understatement and overstatement as well as thecontradictory statement. It discusses the application of those variation verbal irony skills.Chapter Two analyzes the application of the situational irony on the basis of this novelin three paradigms: the difference between the plot result and reader’s anticipation, thearrangement’s contradiction of the plot, and the parody of classical words. ChapterThree combines the theory of structure irony with the context to identify the aestheticvalue of its appliance. Chapter Four expresses that irony is a way of literary expressionas well as an ideology and view of life. So the aesthetic value of the art of irony isdiscussed through two aspects: its spiritual orientation and effect. In the last part, theauthor of the thesis thinks that the outstanding feature of A Frolic of His Own consists inthe perfect integration of the absurd opinion and the unique art of irony. However, theauthor of the thesis also points out the problems of this paper, and brings forward theadvices for the future.