Mrs. B (Verbal Irony)
After getting brain cancer, Mrs. B speaks ironically without any pretense or apparent reason, which makes it very challenging for Sacks to administer tests of her perceptions. When he tests her left-right discrimination, for example, she sometimes says the wrong answer ironically, even though (apparently) she knows which answer is correct. She simply doesn’t care to make the differentiation anymore, because, as she reports, nothing matters at all to her.
José’s attendant (Situational Irony)
In a moment of situational irony, the attendant on staff in José’s ward calls José an idiot, and then goes on to say: “They says he’s ‘autistic,’ but he’s just an idiot” (215). This slack miswording of “they say” creates a humorous fissure between the attendant as a supposed authority on the matter of idiocy, and his own idiotic way of speaking.
Dr. Sacks with John and Michael (Dramatic Irony)
The way Dr. Sacks acts around John and Michael, the autistic mental-calculators, creates an ironic tension between our expectation for Sacks to act as an authority and the reality of the situation that unfolds. Sacks becomes obsessed with seeking their approval, going home and rifling through his charts of factors, logarithms, and prime numbers in order to participate in the numerical game he observes them playing. Although he ostensibly finds John and Michael ugly and unpleasant, he behaves as if they were the cool kids at the cafeteria table, engaged in a conversation that Sacks, a “normal,” does not get to be involved in.
The man who mistook his wife for a hat (Situational and Dramatic Irony)
There is an ironic tension between the way Dr. P presents himself and the way that he acts. He is an upper-class man of distinction, whom Sacks describes as being quite intellectual and quick-witted. However, the way he acts is like a total fool, mistaking fire hydrants for young children and his wife for a hat. There is a second layer of irony to his mistakes, here: each time Dr. P makes one of these mistakes, his expectation of what he’s reaching for is entirely and surprisingly different than what that object actually is.
