A Distant Episode

Content Warning: The story and this guide discuss extreme violence, captivity, and enslavement. The guide also references imperialism.

Irony is a literary device involving a gap between what one would expect and what is actually the case. There are several instances of irony in the story, many of which highlight the sense of chaos and unpredictability that underlie the horror in the story while highlighting the themes of “Primitiveness,” “Civilization,” and Psychology and Orientalism and Western Naivete in the Face of Colonialism. The core irony is the fact that the professor loses his tongue, the very organ from which his profession’s name derives. Without the ability to communicate, the professor loses his rationality, and yet this too is ironic, as the professor’s efforts to communicate have gone astray long before the tongue-cutting; if (as the professor seems to believe) language, rationality, and Western “civilization” go hand in hand, the implication is that the professor’s colonialist foray into Algeria was irrational from the start.

Another key irony occurs when the professor reminds himself that the Algerians are not “primitives.” Although he is correct, had he had a more prejudicial view of the Algerian people, he might have avoided the terrible fate that befell him.