Walls
For the naïve innocent hick Clyde, the high exterior walls of skyscrapers and the elegant portraits and lamps hanging on the interior walls become in the first part of the book imagery which is synonymous with independence from his overbearing family and the promise of success and wealth. This view gradually turns darkly ironic as the mechanics of fate inexorably trap Clyde into a world in which every wall seems to become a prison, foreshadowing the literal prison walls which eventually hold him captive.
Falling Out of the Boat
While in the canoe, Clyde tells Roberta how lovely she looked standing on the bank looking at the lilies. In fact, so entranced was he by her beauty that he says “I almost fell out of the boat.” This assertion—which may be true or may be mere flattery, it is not certain—takes on a particularly dark ironic shading when during the trial Justice Oberwaltzer instructs the jury that they must find Clyde not guilty even if Roberta accidentally “fell out of the boat” and he still did nothing to help her.
Ironic Tragedy/Tragic Irony
The title itself is an example of irony based on the traditional literary conventions of irony. Aristotelian imperatives aside, the basic defining nature of tragedy in literature is the presence of a defining character flaw that compels the movement toward a tragic ending. Fate may be preordained, but path to that fate is pushed along by specific actions undertaken by the tragic hero that either flaunt fate or attempt to elude it. By contrast, the series of events that leads to Clyde’s tragic fates are not engineered by any obvious character flaw, but seem to represent a logical progression of accidents and coincidences. His path from the bellboy job to the automobile accident to meeting his uncle are not the direct result of any agency of motivation on his part. Likewise, the path from meeting Robert to falling in love with Sondra to the accident in the canoe and the events of his trial are a chain of events which seem to befall him rather than any representing a sequence of intent.
Psalms 69:5
One of the unframed mottoes adorning the religious mission which young Clyde called home is the scriptural quote:
"O GOD, THOU KNOWEST MY FOOLISHNESS, AND MY SINS ARE NOT HID FROM THEE."
That these mottoes must have been imprinted upon Clyde’s mind even if only in a manner below the threshold of the conscious makes his questioning cries heard only in the silent hall of his brain as he contemplates killing Robert profoundly ironic.
“Who would see?
Who could hear?”
Collarless
Clyde pins his greatest hope for success on the good fortune of being a blood relative to the founder of the Griffiths Collar Company of Lycurgus. And so it with a final corrosively cruel dash of irony that he comes to the end of his life preparing for his date with the executioner by being furnished by the state with slippers, socks, black pants and a white shirt…lacking a collar.
