 As we transition from childhood into adulthood, we begin to realize that things, people and events are often not what they appear to be. At times, this realization can be funny, but can also be disturbing or confusing. Children often recoil at this murky confusion, preferring a simple world in which what you see is what you get. Adults, on the other hand, often love this confusion, so much so that we oftentimes tell ourselves stories just to conjure up this state. Whether we run from it or savor it, make no mistake, irony is a dominant feature of our lives. In simplest terms, irony occurs in literature and in life whenever a person says something or does something that departs from what they or we expect them to say or do. Just as there are countless ways of misunderstanding the world, sorry kids, there are many different kinds of irony. The three most common kinds you'll find in literature classrooms are verbal irony, dramatic irony, and situational irony. Verbal irony occurs whenever a character tells us something that differs from what they mean, what they intend, or what the situation requires. Any popular internet memes capitalize on this difference, as in this example. Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Cask of a Montillado, offers a more complex example of verbal irony. In the story, a man named Montressor lures another man named Fortunato into the catacombs beneath his house by appearing to ask him for advice on a recent wine purchase. In reality, he means to murder him, brutally, by walling him up in those catacombs. As the two men travel deeper underground, Fortunato has a coughing fit, and Montressor appears to comfort him in the following richly ironic exchange. Come, I said with decision, we will go back. Your health is precious. You are rich, respected, admired, beloved. You are happy, as I once was. You are a man to be missed. For me, it is no matter. We will go back. You will be ill, and I cannot be responsible. Enough, Fortunato said. The cough is a mere nothing. It will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough. True. True, I reply. If we only paid attention to the appearance of Montressor's words, we would think he was genuinely concerned with poor Fortunato's health as he hacks up along. We would also think that Montressor was trying to be nice to Fortunato by agreeing with him that he won't die of a cough. But knowing Montressor's true intentions, which he reveals at the start of the story, we are able to understand the verbal irony that colors these assurances. Fortunato will not die of a cough, Montressor knows, but he certainly will die. This scene is also a great example of dramatic irony. Dramatic irony occurs whenever a character in a story is deprived of an important piece of information that governs the plot that surrounds them. Fortunato in this case believes that Montressor is a friendly shrub with a terrible wine palette and a curious habit of storing his wine near the dead bodies of his ancestors. The pleasure of reading the story stems in part from knowing what he doesn't, that he's walking into Montressor's trap. We delight in other words in the ironic difference between our complex way of understanding the world and Fortunato's simple worldview. Finally, the story also includes arguably a great example of situational irony. As its name suggests, situational irony occurs when a character's intentions are foiled and people do certain things to bring about an intended result, but in fact produce the opposite result. At the start of the story, Montressor tells his readers that his project will succeed only if he, quote, makes himself felt as such to him who had done the wrong, end quote. In other words, Fortunato must not only know that he's been tricked, but also why he was tricked, and why he must die. If this is Montressor's intention, however, he goes about it in a rather strange way, offering Fortunato countless sips of wine on their trip into the catacombs that gets his antagonist pretty drunk. At the end of the story, Montressor has certainly got away with the crime, but it's far from certain that Fortunato or even Montressor knows why he was given such a terrible death. So why does Montressor insist on telling us that his story is a success? One reason might be that he's anxious about the situational irony that envelopes his story and wants to cover the reality of that irony with a simple appearance of triumph. He's gotten away with it, and Fortunato knows why he must die. If readers push back against this desired outcome, testing it against Fortunato's confusion and being chained to a wall and bricked into place, he travels further than even Montressor is willing to go into the murky catacombs of irony.