The Great Gatsby - Dramatic Irony

"'Then he killed her,' said Wilson.  His mouth dropped open suddenly.  'Who did?' 'I have a way of finding out.'" (pg. 159)

I believe at this point in the book, Wilson associates the murderer and the person having an affair with his wife to be the same person.  The reader knows that it is not who Wilson thinks it is.  In fact, it is actually Daisy who drove the car and not Gatsby.  Wilson never finds out the truth though, and things end up bad for Gatsby.  Wilson finds Gatsby and shoots and kills him as soon as he sees him.  His whole goal was to get revenge on who he thought killed his wife.  Unfortunately, Wilson was not correct in his assumptions, and Gatsby had to pay the price.  Although I can somewhat see where Wilson was coming from, I believe that he had the wrong reasons for just going out and killing Gatsby.  He should have had some evidence to fully accuse Gatsby of murdering Myrtle before going out and killing him.

APO 96225

This was definitely my favorite poem of the unit because it was told like a story.  Irony is a big part of the poem as dramatic irony takes place when we know what went on in the Vietnam War, but the people in the U.S. really had no idea.  A mother begs her son to tell them what is going on, but the son is trying to block his parents from the depressing side of the war.  The mother continues to beg, and the son tells her that he killed a man and dropped napalm on women and children.  She was horrified, and the father told the son to not write depressing letters.  I find this quite hysterical because the parents were asking for the truth.  When they finally received the truth, it was horrible, and they did not want to know anymore.  The poem really shows how clueless the people in the U.S. were about the war in Vietnam, and all they really wanted was answers.  In reality, the people just wanted to hear positive things happening in Vietnam instead of negative.