Difference Between Satire And Irony

1. During this period, advances in travel and communication begin to demystify the west. Through developments like the telegraph and the transcontinental railroad, people no longer had to rely on fiction to inform them about the west. They could hear first-hand accounts from people they trust or even travel there themselves with much less hardship than there was previously. With this increased access, authors no longer had to satisfy audiences’ expectations about the west; instead, they could be critical of the myths of the west that had remained popular for so long.
2. Mark Twain’s Roughing It and Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” differ from our previous readings in that they don’t take the myth of the west too seriously. Rather than presenting
According to the website Literary Devices, satire is “a technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society” (“Satire”). Satire can often be confused with irony or sarcasm, but the main difference is that “while satire is constructive, sarcasm can be destructive” (“Difference Between Sarcasm and Satire”). In other words, unlike sarcasm, satire is used to identify a problem, raise awareness, and hopefully make a positive impact on society. In terms of these definitions, both Twain and Crane satirize the foolishness of western myths through the excessive anxiety of Roughing It’s narrator and the guests in “The Blue Hotel.” Because the pieces target myths and dime novels in particular, their audiences seem to be the people that, like the Swede, consume only violent, stereotypical western literature. Both authors want to show to the readers that their preconceptions of the West are generally false and unhelpful.
4. In Roughing It, when the protagonist meets Slade, he exclaims, “Here was romance, and I was sitting face to face with it!” (Lyons 226), highlighting the irony of the situation. He refers to the myth of Slade as exaggerated fiction, and yet is still surprised by Slade’s kindness. This moment is significant because for the first time, the protagonist is presented with reality, with the real Slade, and he’s still unable to separate the “romance” from the truth. He’s “sitting face to face” to what any objective observer would see as a kind man, but the protagonist is completely blind to what is in front of