The main heroine of “The Necklace”, Mathilde, spent ten years of her life repaying a debt for the necklace that turned out to be a fake. Parvathi (2020) describes the process in this way – “the author sets up a scene one way, and then the opposite of what you might expect actually happens”. In Maupassant’s “The Necklace», the use of such a technique turns the reader’s perception of what happened in the story upside down. The use of situational irony keeps the reader interested and elicits a serious emotional response that influences on how much the author’s idea will be imbued. If the reader will able to pay attention to this, then it could be considered that the use of irony helped the author to be correctly understood. Indeed, according to the plot of the story, the punishment reaches the woman after she fulfills her philistine dream. It can be assumed that the idea of the author here is that, in his opinion, those who cannot appreciate what they have should be punished. She strives to be what she will never become, forgetting that one can be happy without insanely expensive jewelry and luxurious balls. 32), Mathilde is convinced that those things would bring her true happiness. Despite the fact that “she had neither frocks not jewels” (Maupassant, 2012, p. The author chooses this type of narration on purpose, showing that Mathilde is unaware of how wrong she is in her beliefs. In the story “The Necklace”, it goes like this: the story of Mathilde is told from the perspective of an abstract narrator. Therefore, irony helps to convey information between the author and the reader. According to Milanowicz, “irony requires senders and recipients to be engaged” (16). The point of the first kind of irony is dramatic irony it happens when the readers know more than the heroes do. These four varieties of irony found in the text thus include dramatic irony, situational irony, verbal irony, and structural irony. In the modern theory of literary criticism, more kinds of irony are known, but in the context of this study, it seems rational to dwell on these types only.

There are four types of irony found in the text and essential for the current analysis.

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Guy with big clock necklace