Nameless
The novel’s guiding irony is that the family dog is the only character given a name. A name denotes identity and identity indicates individualism. Sounder is the only character that really has a distinct individual identity and this translates into the dog being more human than the people. This is appropriate since the human characters are essentially divided into those who dehumanize others and those who are dehumanized.
Barkless
In his role as the symbol of humanity, when the once great bark of Sounder is lost and falls silent, this becomes an ironic metaphor. Still retaining his humanity even as he loses his ability to “speak” the irony derives from the way his black owners have been silence by white society as a collective unit.
Curtains
The boy expresses a discomfort regarding the big houses owned by white people who are rich enough to have curtains covering their windows. There is a certain irony in his apprehension because he is frightened the idea of not knowing if the people living in those houses are furtively watching him as he passes, for the time blissfully unaware of the irony that the white people on the other side of the curtain are likely hiding as they watch because they are afraid of him.
Terrible Irony
There is a terribly cruel irony in the father being arrested for stealing the ham. He is a sharecropper dependent upon assistance by natural forces beyond his control, and a bad year for crops can quickly turn the pride of feeding his family into despair of watching them go hungry. The theft of the ham certainly is illegal, but whether it is immoral as well is ambiguous. The horrible irony, of course, is that not too many years before a bad harvest would not have impacted his family’s ability to eat since a slaveowner’s economy would be dependent upon keeping his work force fed.
Heroes of the Bible
The boy draws inspiration for his plight of being a perpetual underdog pitted against enormously overwhelming foes. He finds kinship in the stories of David and Joseph being the odds rising greatness in their own different ways. The irony is not perceived: standing out any actual historical genetic fact, David and Joseph have both been presented over the millennia as white men. So even his heroes are representatives of the white power structure and despite being underdogs, they still had the benefit of representing the dominant “race.”
