Irony make the truth of past situations obvious to all. Other prominent examples of outcomes now seen as poignantly contrary to expectation include: Irony is often used in literature to produce a comic effect. This may also be combined with satire. For instance, an author may facetiously state something as a well-known fact and then demonstrate through the narrative that the fact is untrue. Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" begins with the proposition "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." In fact, it soon becomes
A God in Ruins (novel) time … allowing Atkinson to reveal her characters in glimpses over the course of the novel while withholding vital information that creates mysteries at the heart of the story." Ultimately, in what critic James Walton called, "one of the most devastating twists in recent fiction," the novel ends with Teddy dying in the war, reversing events and erasing characters. The book begins with three epigraphs, the first of which refers to the title: "A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from