The hungry mother
Carolina's self-sacrifice and motherly nature are both indicators of one of nature's most powerful ironies. The irony is that a person would sacrifice their well-being for love. She has to balance that self-sacrifice against the weight of her own worth as her family's sole provider, so she cannot starve all the way to death or incapacitation. She must only allow herself to fast as much as possible to maximize the chances that her children eat enough to survive. Children die all the time in her neck of the woods.
The dependence on fate
For someone so riddled and perplexed by fate, for someone from whom fate has taken so much away and for someone from whom fate has demanded such a strenuous life of sacrifice and discomfort—for someone like Carolina, there is nothing more ironic in her life than her absolute dependence on fate. When she is desperate for shoes for her daughter, the universe gives her some shoes from the trash. Is that fancy? No. But it is enough, and she counts it as a miracle. The irony is a kind of ultimate dependency, not on husband or provider, but on fate.
The ruthless patriarch
The patriarchy is symbolized in a highly ironic character. One expects from Carolina's story that perhaps her husband is dead or away or something. Nope. She runs into him and asks him for some support—anything he can manage to give her. Ironically, he has to beg the father of his children to help her to care for them. He is sociopathic, grand-standing his wealth for her, but then sharing only paltry amounts. He afflicts her by highlighting her dependency on him.
Dramatic irony and skill
Carolina might not be as hopeless as she often feels, if perhaps her fate includes a wild change of lifestyle. Her main dream has always been to be a writer, and when she contemplated what she wanted for her life, she always decided she wanted to be a published author. Any level of success would radically transform her life and her family's success, but she does not know whether she is good or bad at writing because something about being a person naturally limits a person's ability to judge their own work without just projecting their insecurity. She must do her work despite that ironic lack of knowledge.
Death and poverty
One situational irony in the book is that life's most essential dramatic irony is not allowed to Carolina. To put that more straight-forwardly, one can think of death as life's most powerful irony, because although humans technically understand death, it is often not part of daily consciousness to consider death, until of course death becomes unignorable in life. Ironically, death is never ignorable to Carolina. Through irony, we see that privilege allows people to live without the fear of death, but Carolina has to hurdle immense obstacles with the full chronic pain of death fear for not only her own starving body, but also her priceless children.
