Betrayal, the eight letter word a parent never wants to deal with. Lying, a five letter word a kid never wants to get caught doing. Explaining, a ten letter word that everyone ends up doing. Being deceitful and betraying someone is never a good thing, and can end up coming back to get you later on in life. In the short story “The Lie” by Kurt Vonnegut, Eli, a small kid, ends up creating and making a big mistake by lying to his parents, and later on in the story, it comes back and creates major chaos in his life.
Eli is a young, normal teenage boy that attends Whitehill School for boys. His family attended Whitehill Schools ever since they were little boys, and thought this year was going to be like no other. But ever since he got the letter of acceptance, things really have changed. His parents think everything is going to go normally, go to the dinner, and get ready for school time, but what they don’t know, is that Eli has been keeping a very big lie behind their backs. Keeping something from your parents is always a bad thing to do, but when it holds your future, it’s important to tell them right away. You want to tell them right away, because you don’t want to get caught in a situation that you can’t get out of right away, because you’re too deep into the lie. Then when your parents confront you about it, you’ll be in more trouble than if you would have told them right off the bat.
During the story, the main mode was ironic for many different reasons. The mode line for the story perfectly fits irony because first, everything sort of starts out in chaos, because Eli starts off the story by ripping up his letter of acceptance for the school. This is chaos because his parents know nothing about and later on in the story, this becomes a big issue. Then conflicts start to rise, they go to the opening dinner for the school, and they start to realize that Eli is keeping something from them. This creates many conflicts because Eli’s parents think he’s already been accepted into the school, and they finally figure out “the lie”. Then it eventually ends in insanity because Dr. Remenzel, or Eli’s dad, says that they can never come back to this school again, because Eli ruined the Remenzel name forever. Some symbols that represent the irony mode of this story are the letter, which shows the recognition of admittance of getting into the school. Another symbol is the school, which represents something his dad wants or his dad’s ambition. The last symbol would be the test to get into the school, which represents Eli’s worth. Overall, all of these symbols, and the plot line of the story, really represents the mode of literature of irony.
One other lesson that can be learned in “The Lie” could be that you shouldn’t put a lot of pressure on someone to do something. Because sometimes when pressure is put on you, sometimes you tend to do even worse than just normal pressure from yourself. This is exactly what happened to Eli, his dad put a lot of pressure on him to pass the test to get into the Whitehill School for Boys, and this may have been the reason he didn’t pass. I know this happens, because it has happened to me before. I study and know everything perfectly, and then when I feel pressure on myself, I tend to do worse and forget everything that I knew. Eli definitely felt pressure to get into the school, because generations of the Remenzel family has always gotten into the school, so of course he was going to have some sort of pressure. This may have been some of the reason Eli didn’t get into the school, and now everything is in chaos because of one bad choice by Dr. Remenzel, peer pressure.
Betrayal and lying basically mean the same thing, but betrayal is just a bit more powerful. But, whenever you do those two words, you end up having to explain everything. This happens in the short story “ The Lie” by Kurt Vonnegut, a teenage boy betrays someone about something very important, and it ends up coming back, and really hurting him in the end. Even when the truth is important, he still makes the wrong decision, which is to lie.
