Irony in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"

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This, the Outcasts of Poker Flat is the story of six people and their adventure in the woods during a snow storm. The Story came about because the people of Poker Flat where in the state of mind that if you did something that was against their normal or traditional custom you where to be hanged if you did not leave Poker Flat immediately. The people of Poker Flat did not take pity on the ones who were morally misbehaved. “This was done permanently in regard of two men who were then hanging from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch, and temporarily in the banishment of certain other objectionable characters." All the “good people” thought Poker Flat was a place for just that, good people. In Poker Flat they did not care who you were; and if you did something wrong you were punished. "I regret to say that some of these were ladies. It is but due to sex, ". . . . Impropriety was professional . . . standards of evil that Poker Flat ventured to sit in judgment." Without doubt or hesitation Mr. Oakhurst was thought by the people of Poker Flat to be a, gambler; and not to accept Fate. With Mr. Oakhurst life was at best to him at an uncertain, exciting game . . . in favor of the dealer of course." In reality he had a philosophic calmness. “The philosophic Oakhurst alone remained silent.” With the characteristics Mr. Oakhurst portrays at the beginning of this short story it would be expected by the reader that he would naturally be the leader, and the most strong willed out of the six. On the contrary, instead of Oakhurst becoming the stronger person, and leading the others to safety he resorted to killing himself instead of suffering in the freezing snow. “And pulse less and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts

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