Question

Oscar Wilde "The Importance of Being Earnest". What do you think is the function of all the witty paradoxes and epigrams in this play?

Answer 1

Answer:

The importance of being Earnest is a masterpiece that talks in a funny and sarcastic way about society.

Explanation:

The characters are mainly from the victorian upper class which results to be satiric itself since in the story the author makes jokes about those characters. The author normally exalts the characteristics of frivolity, greed and thirst for power and money of the characters in the play but does so in a general way in a mocking way in order to show how these bad ways can have different meanings depending on the point of view in which these can be analyzed. for example in the excerpt utter by Lady Bracknell:

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

It is possible to appreciate how the author intends to show the misfortune of the person whose parents died, not the parents itself, this results to be a sarcastic way to say that the person is the guilty one of the bad things that occur around.