Carnal Knowledge Coraghessan Boyle How

¶ … Carnal Knowledge

Coraghessan Boyle [...] how the narrator uses irony, and give at least three examples where the events might be construed as ironic. There are many ironies in this amusing short story. For example, not all the carnality in carnal knowledge revolves around sex; it revolves around the carnality of the ecoterrorists and their diverse type of revolt, along with the narrator's total lack of carnality

This is an amusing and yet tragic story that gets much of its tone and style from the irony the author uses throughout the story. Language sets the tone of this story, and it is quite important to the overall style and irony that permeates the pages. The story is part romance and part tragedy, and the ironic tone that it takes from the beginning helps move the story along, and lead to the inevitable conclusion. The main character is impulsive and inquisitive, but he is too "hungry" - not for meat, but for love, and this hunger comes out in his constant discussion of food throughout the story, which is highly ironic since he is in love with a vegetarian who is concerned with food as a metaphor for suffering, rather than in feeding the body. In the beginning of the story he thinks to himself, "Beef, mutton, pork, venison, dripping burgers, and greasy ribs - it was all the same to me, food, the body's fuel" (Boyle 324), and so he shows early on that he and Alena could not be more different. He latches on to Alena by accident in the beginning of the story, and the accident at the end of the story ends their affair, which is also ironic. The tone and style of this story all add up to the humor it creates, but also add to the irony of the entire situation, and the loss of love at the end.

Irony plays a major part in the story, as it is not only ironic that the narrator would meet Alena at the beach on his birthday, but even more ironic that the act of freeing the turkeys would end in the carnage on the freeways. The turkeys died a horrible death anyway, and the narrator had to witness it. It is both tragic and ironic, and even a little funny, too. This ending signifies the loss of love, but also shows the hopelessness of the ecoterrorists cause and methods. Letting the turkeys go just caused them an even more horrific death, which is the high point of irony in the story. Boyle writes, "As I inched closer, the tires creeping now, the pulse of the lights in my face, I saw that the road was coated in feathers, turkey feathers. A storm of them. A blizzard" (Boyle 337). This is the ultimate irony of the story, but it is more than that, because it makes the narrator really see how pathetic his affair with Alena really was, and how pointless. He also finally acknowledges the emptiness inside him that Alena could not fill, and that is the ultimate irony of his carnal knowledge with this woman.