Previous
Literary Devices
Definition of Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given situation, and that of the... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a character's understanding of a given... read full definition
Dramatic irony is a plot device often used in theater, literature, film, and television to highlight the difference between a... read full definition
Chapter 7: The Sixth Night
Explanation and Analysis—At the Temple:
The White Tiger is a humorous commentary on the unreliability of face-value assumptions. Through instances of dramatic irony, its potent satire exposes all the mistaken impressions and half-hearted illusions that its characters rely upon. One particularly telling moment happens in Chapter 7, when Ashok surprises Balram with a visit to his underground servant’s quarters:
Mr. Ashok lifted up a corner of the net and looked at me, a sly grin on his face.
‘I know exactly what you were doing.’
‘Sir?’
‘I was calling your name and you weren’t responding. So I came down to see. But I know exactly what you were doing…that other driver, the man with the pink lips, he told me.’
My heart pounded. I looked down at the ground.
‘He said you were at the temple, offering prayers for my health.’
The irony of this master-servant exchange is especially comic. Ashok assumes that Balram had been piously praying for his health, and he could not have fallen further from the truth. Contrary to Vitiligo-Lips’s alibi, Ashok’s “religious” servant has just returned from “dipping his beak” into a faux-blond prostitute and getting conned while doing so. Because of Balram’s first-person narration, the reader knows what the master does not.
Ashok’s naïve simplicity reflects how deeply out-of-touch he is from his servant. The master harbors no suspicions against Balram, even against the warnings of his wife and brother. This lenience is both freeing and oppressive—it makes Ashok more sympathetic than Balram’s other masters, but it doesn’t prevent him from ignoring the plight of the poor. Oblivious to Balram’s whereabouts and uninterested in meaningfully engaging with his servant, Ashok indulges in a tourist-like romanticism of India’s lower-class. He misinterprets Balram’s eye touch as a sign of worship, frets over the sorry state of his servant’s bedroom, and then proceeds to do nothing about it. He projects his own perceptions rather than honoring Balram’s own agency. Ashok’s generosity may give Balram a measure of dignity, but it stems from a place of massive ignorance. “I want to be a simple man like you,” he tells the servant who is scheming to kill him. In declaring Balram to be “stupid as hell” but “honest,” Ashok ends up duping none other than himself.
Related Themes:
