Ch.1 (entry #1)

"The irony is so great.  A whole city gets burned down and thousands and thousands of people are killed.  And this American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he is given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad" (Vonnegut 4).  Kurt Vonnegut was talking to his friend Bernard V. O'Hare, and Vonnegut was thinking of using the execution of Edgar Derby for taking a teapot.  Vonnegut is correct that there is irony  in that after thousands of people were killed, a man was shot for taking a teapot. However the quote above is an example of situational irony. There is situational irony in the fact that the death of one man would be the climax, and the bombing/deaths of thousands of people would not be. It really just doesn't make sense if you think about.  It would be expected that the bombing of the citizens of Dresden would be the climax, but Vonnegut was serious about making the climax about the death of one man. I believe that Vonnegut did include this tid bit of information from his life as a source of comedy to make the readers laugh. I can personally say that this quote made me laugh after I reread it a few times.