He was reputed a wit, an ironist, delighting in ambiguity, both pious and scatological, at home equally with the vernacular and the rhetorical, with the Greek philosophers and the early church fathers.His political satire "Utopia" owed much to Plato's "Republic", a work which also inspired his ideas on female education.
But where Conrad's Marlow is a dreamer, unembarrassed by the mysteries he offers his audience (both real and fictional), Freyn is a self-conscious sophisticate, an ironist, snagging himself on his listener, whose own affectless info-tech voice we hear at intervals struggling to comprehend.
That high level of citizen involvement prompted the renowned 20th-century Swiss playwright and ironist Friedrich Dürrenmatt to allegorize Switzerland as a prison in which each Swiss citizen was at the same time prisoner and guard.
Thus the opposite of tragedy is not comedy but the literature of cynicism and despair, and the opposite of the tragic artist's stance, which is one of compassion and involvement, is that of the detached and cynical ironist.
In L'Ecclésiaste (1882; "Ecclesiastes") and two articles on Amiel (1884), he is above all an ironist combatting the Pharisees (religious legalists).
I prefer to think of Akin, however, not as a forger of patterns but as an ironist who understands that bad luck is a crucible, in the heat of which we are tested, burned away, or occasionally transformed.
Kadare is inevitably likened to Orwell and Kundera, but he is a far deeper ironist than the first, and a better storyteller than the second.
A natural ironist, she hates sentiment, and is happiest when looking at grim industrial scenes or setting stuff on fire, such as the hair on the legs of boys she likes.
If Rautavaara is a dreamer, Sallinen is an ironist, an elegist, a dealer in lyric fragments.
Instead, the Narrator establishes himself as an ironist with a comfortable, middle-class pedigree.
He's crazy, of course, but maybe he's some kind of didactic lunatic, a cracked ironist himself: You want violence as spectacle, I'll give it to you.
