Literary Irony

June 20, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been leafing through The Wheel of Time books and reading the parts that catch my interest. I’m quickly bypassing all the utterly boring sections, especially when it comes to the teenage girls and their individual grabs for power. These sections could have all been done through gossip or news being passed hand to hand or any number of ways to show their rise to power without readers being crushed beneath the banality. Some readers like those sections, the same people who think those two are the real heroes of the story, though I can see nothing of value to their stories other than that they became forces to oppose and perhaps help the hero.

Mostly I’m interested in the parts of the story that we aren’t bludgeoned with by a plethora of words, parts that slip through the cracks of “backstory” to become something else.

For example, one of the “bad guy” characters showed up in the army of male power-wielders that the hero had been gathering to help him fight the Last Battle. By chance, this particular bad guy was chosen from the ranks to be one of the hero’s personal helpers. Although the bad guy claimed to be a farmer, he seemed rather inept, could barely ride a horse, acted mentally slow, and was often found staring in consternation at the simplest things. He became part of a rebellion that tried to kill the hero, and in turn was himself killed by a “dark friend,” one of those sworn to the Dark Lord because the dark friend assumed he was nothing but the low-level soldier he pretended to be.

But if we turn that story around, piece together what we’ve learned about this bad guy throughout the story, and see it from his point of view, it’s a completely different and ironic tale.

In the first book, the hero kills a bad guy who was trying to kill him. Later, as we find out, this same bad guy is given a new body and sent to be one of the hero’s power wielding soldiers. It was pure happenstance that our bad guy ended up actually being in contact with and in service to the hero. Ouch. Having to serve the very person who killed you? So not fun! At least not for him.

Then we find out this same bad guy, some 3,000 years ago, had been a genius, a genetic researcher who created all the horrible monsters that currently plague the “good guys.” When the Dark Lord had been sealed up after a long-protracted war, this bad guy, along with a bunch of his fellow bad guys had been sealed up, too.

Back when he was sealed up, the world was way more advanced than we today can even dream of being, and so this poor guy wakes up into a backward world he cannot fathom, has no tools and no way to do anything he knows how to do, and so seems to be less than ordinary. And the final irony — this one-time genius, though being one of the premier bad guys, ends up getting killed by another baddie because he’s . . . ordinary.

Gotta love irony!

Another striking irony to me is that some of the characters hated by readers were not written as such by Robert Jordan but by the substitute. One character is a woman who helps the hero as she can, but seems a hard taskmistress since she demands to be treated with courtesy. I don’t think people would have hated her so much if Robert Jordan had been able to finish his books. Most of her worst characteristics ended up in the last three books that had been written by a decidedly inferior writer. So, since those three books don’t exist as far as I’m concerned, she turns out to be a woman who starts out demanding respect and ends up earning it. (I was one who didn’t like her, but she’s a good character up until those final three books, so I’ve come to like her.)

Another such character is a prince who was sworn to protect his sister, the daughter-heir, but she’s disappeared, no one will tell him where she is, and so he’s lost. He doesn’t know what to do and ends up — maybe — making bad decisions based solely on the chance of finding his sister. He’s also in love with a woman who is off doing self-important things, who says she loves him but doesn’t want his protection (even though that’s all he’s been trained to do). His bad luck was to be tied to both the power-hungry teenagers mentioned above.

To me his storyline is sad, and he only becomes an incompetent fool in the last three books under the pen of the substitute.

So, here’s another irony — readers love the substitute author, think he’s better than the original author, but blame Jordan for the characters they hate even though it was the substitute that mangled the characters. Yep! Gotta love irony.

I have those last three books, but as I’m leafing through Jordan’s books this time, I can see more and more mistakes the substitute made, and so I know for a fact I will never want to reread them. I just don’t know what to do with them. If I need the room on my bookshelf, I suppose I’ll take them to one of the little libraries around town since I still can’t force myself to go to the city library. Meantime, there they sit.

Because this post is about irony, I’m trying to find the irony in that previous paragraph, but it seems straightforward to me. Unless the irony isn’t in the paragraph so much as in the books. Although a lot of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is utterly brilliant, an equal amount is plebian at best.