"Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do." (235) (Situational Irony)
The reader is given a mission by Ataguitanian High Command to liaise with Arkadian Porphyrich, Director General of the State Police Archives in Ircania. These two men discuss the practice of banning books, which occurs in both of the fictional countries they represent, Ataguitania and Ircania. Arkadian Porphyrich ironically states that living in a police state in which books are banned and censored actually increases people's esteem for the written word, since banning books shows the government sees them as important and influential. There is situational irony in this idea that criminalizing something would actually be positive for its image.
Silas Flannery (Dramatic Irony)
In If on a winter's night a traveler, Silas Flannery is an author of low-brow, popular novels. There is irony in the perception of him by other characters as an author of extreme importance precisely because of his lack of refinement. Ludmilla thinks of him as the ideal writer because she likes to think of writing as a natural, straightforward process; she says authors should write books "as a pumpkin vine produces pumpkins" (189). She does not seem to know that Flannery receives money from brands by putting their products in his books. Another group of characters that idolize Flannery is the scouts in the woods who believe aliens are trying to communicate through him. Similar to Ludmilla's reasoning for liking Flannery's writing style, they think he is the ideal author to be a conduit for alien communication because he simply writes what he thinks.
"In a network of lines that intersect" (Situational Irony)
"In a network of lines that intersect" is a story-within-a-story laced with situational irony. The main irony of the story is that a man who is paranoid about being plotted against would, rather than retreating or hiding, attempt to put himself more in the spotlight. The man goes so far as to attempt to ward off kidnapping by staging a kidnapping of himself, which results in him actually being kidnapped. This humorous situational irony causes the reader to contemplate how mental illness, particularly extreme paranoia, affects behavior.
Lotaria's Reading (Situational Irony)
Calvino parodies contemporary practices of literary analysis through the character of Lotaria. Lotaria's system of reading and analyzing books is so extreme as to hardly constitute reading. For example, one way that she analyzes books is to have a computer count the number of times each word in the book is used and then reorganize the words by frequency. It is ironic that someone who sees herself as an exceptionally perceptive reader is in fact not reading books at all.
