Pride And Prejudice - Pride

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the goings-on in that society are so lively and sparkling with irony that most people cannot help but like the novel. Jane Austen applies irony on different levels in her novel Pride and Prejudice. She uses various means of making her opinion on 18th century society known to the reader through her vivid and ironic descriptions used in the book. To bring this paper into focus, I will discuss two separate means of applying irony, as pertaining to a select few of the book's characters. The novel is introduced by an omniscient narrator, unknown to the reader, who describes and comments on the given situations throughout the novel. The narrator serves to represent and speak for Jane Austen, enabling her to aim her criticism not only through the characters, but also in a more direct fashion. She uses this unspecified person, who is outside of all the novel's action and gives explanations, as a medium of communication to present her own opinion in an allusively open way. This narrator is ...

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to Jane "(w)ith a renewal of tenderness" (p. 27). These high-society women are well versed at putting others down and whimsically, and as they think wittily, insulting the characters of those who are of a "lower class" - and Austen comments on it ironically by describing their behavior with irony. Through the narrator, Austen shows us how fickle this society is; being based on class and rank. The narrator exposes the vanities and its stupidity rather drastically. The comment on Aunt Phillips who "would hardly have resented a comparison with the housekeeper's room" (p. 56) of Rosing's with her own living-room is so ironically bitter that it even borders on being mean. These are only a ...

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