Part One.
Essay 4:
Using at least two stories from Tobias Wolff's Back in the World, explain the book's title in your thesis. Successful papers will use personal experience to illustrate your major points.
Paragraph 1: Introduction
Paragraph 2: Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping components
Paragraphs 3-9: Support your mapping components
Paragraph 10. Restate your thesis
Last page: Works Cited with 2 to 4 sources
Part Two: Lexicon
1. Sloth posing as a Christian 19
2. Jerry the mountebank
3. Mendacity, the art of lying
4. Duplicity, the art of being two-faced
5. Obsequiousness, the art of butt-kissing
6. Sobriquet, nickname, “Slim” 31
7. Jerry’s B.S. is intoxicating and contagious 32, 33
8. Certain lies are indomitable juggernauts 35 and 49 (can’t put the genie back in the bottle)
9. Sagacity; Leo’s thoughts show wisdom on page 43.
10. Serendipitous
Why irony is an important part of going back into the world
Irony is a quality that requires maturity and wisdom. It's the ability to have insight and go past the common and superficial assumptions most people have when they respond to certain situations.
Irony is the ability to the see the complexity of an occurrence and thus not overreact to it as "good" or "bad."
A person who has a "sense of irony" has wisdom and tends to be more even keeled, avoiding emotional ups and downs. Additionally, a person with a sense of irony has a wry sense of humor, which is neither cynical or overly optimistic, but a strange mix of both.
Irony is, specifically, being able to see certain contradictions when others cannot see these contradictions.
Leo goes on a journey in which the more he sees his life contradictions, the more he matures and emerges from his false self to his real self. The missing person is no more.
Part Three: Types of Irony
1. Plot Irony: A reversal that results in the opposite of our expectations like a car death after wearing seatbelt. This is one of the most common forms of irony.
A vegetarian becomes a world-famous butcher.
In all romantic comedies, the potential lovers hate each other at the beginning of the film.
In 10cc's famous song, "I'm Not in Love," the persona tries to convince himself, and the woman, that he is not in love but the more he says this mantra the more he reveals that he is helplessly in love.
A man hates academia and education and he becomes a professor.
A woman grows up hating dogs, then falls in love with them only to discover that she has developed a dog allergy.
2. Serendipitous Irony: The more we deviate from our original plan, the better the outcome. A botched play on the athletic field becomes a huge score.
3. Faustian Irony: The more we think we’re rising and succeeding in life, the more we are actually falling as we become crushed under the weight of our own vanity, which blinds us and leaves us vulnerable to failure.
4. Idle Irony: The better our life becomes the more we are compelled by boredom to sabotage our happiness. In other words people often cause problems that don’t really exist. And soon they create very real problems out of nothing.
5. Pathological Irony: Man shoots foot off to get rid of a wart.
6. Sarcastic Irony: Saying one thing and meaning an other.
7. Satanic Irony: A greedy man enjoys a long, healthy life while his innocent victims die cruel deaths and their lives are short. This type of irony refutes notions of justice.
8. Narcissistic Irony: searchers for the self lose their selves while people who don’t think about their selves find their selves. Someone goes into therapy and becomes even crazier. Or the example of Stalingrad in which the selfish die and the helpful live.
9. Jungian Irony: The more extreme we develop a facet of our personality the more extreme we develop its opposite. The macho man is also becoming more and more of a baby.
10. Materialistic Irony: You buy an expensive fur coat but the weather is forever hot so you can’t wear it like the old lady in Buenos Aires.
You fight tooth and claw to get rich, your business partner murders you, and your wife and children are left without the provider whose millions are hidden in bank accounts, which the wife cannot access.
11. Short-sighted irony: You workout to impress a girl but she’s turned off by big muscles. You were looking at what you want, not at what she wants. A woman overdressed and wears too much make-up and men are terrified of her.
12. Ironic Irony: You try to be ironic because you think it’s cool but you come across as a fake and as a poser.
13. Corruptive Irony: The more we get our hands dirty in the mess of life, the more pure we become; the more we stay away from the filth, the more contaminated we become by our lack of involvement, which is a form of narcissism. This is the major theme of the story “The Missing Person.” Leo finds love and redemption while working as a hustler in Las Vegas. “It’s all right. I’m here.” These are the final words and show that he’s not the missing person anymore.
Irony in "The Missing Person"
Leo joins a religious order to find love and he finds scorn and hate.
Leo develops a reputation as a killer and earns the respect from the nuns who formerly hated him.
Leo goes to Vegas and finds love.
Leo joins a religious order, not to find God or his soul, but run away from responsibilities.
Leo joins a religious order to find an easy job and instead finds drudgery and disrespect.
Leo becomes corrupt and in doing so he finds purification and evolution.
Sample Introduction, Transition, and Thesis
After decades of vowed silence, Mother finally told me my IQ, which is about 125. That puts me in the 92 percentile ballpark. To be smarter than 92% of the human race is very smart, to be sure, but it’s not exceptional. I know a few people in the 98 percentile and that 6 point differential between them and me seems like an infinite chasm.
One thing I notice about 98s is that they don’t like 92s. They find us annoying because we’re smart enough to want to hang out with the 98s, but we bore them. We want to feed off their energy, we want to snap, crackle and pop with their wit and alacrity, but we’re duds, flaccid wannabes.
Sometimes 92s get lucky and SOUND like 98s but after a while 98s figure out we’re just aspiring to be 98s and we are, much to our self-loathing, incurable 92s.
Another feature about 92s: We don’t like hanging around fellow 92s because they remind us of our essential 92ness.
Of course we don’t hang out with 90s, 85s, or less because they bore and annoy us the same way we bore and annoy 98s.
Some people reading this may accuse me of being a 98 posing as a 92 so that I can use this blog to mock my inferiors. My response to this charge is this: If you are a 98 making this accusation, then my answer is yes I am a 98 posing as a 92. But if you are a 92 or lower and think I’m a 98 posing as a 92, my answer is this: I don’t need your flattery, chump. Who gives a crap what I am?
There are some idiots out there who will say 98s suffer the same torment as 92s do, that in fact, they’re not happy being 98s and would rather hang out with 99s who in turn reject them in the same way that 98s reject 92s.
That’s complete bull, man. There are so few 99s in this world that most likely 98s will never meet 99s and thus 98s roam around Planet Earth thinking they’re The Shit.
That really chafes my hide, the egotism of those people.
Would I be as pompous and annoying as the 98s if I had their IQ? You bet I would.
The writer who hates himself for having an inadequate IQ suffers from the fallacy of greed: always wanting more than he deserves in life. Like Peter from "The Rich Brother" and Leo from "The Missing Person," what the writer above really needs is to know who he is underneath all his layers of B.S. In other words, he needs a back in the world moment, which as Tobias Wolff's stories show, is the result of __________________, ____________________, ___________________, and _____________________.
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