Too Much of a Good Thing (Irony)

"YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED" - pg 233

The parents that are featured in the short story "Once upon a time" are constantly taking precautions based on warnings, examples, and the advice of others. All their intentions are good. All the advice, warnings, and precautions they hear are true. All they want is to make sure their lifestyle and their child is protected. They have been warned against so manner dangers, but the sign on their fence ironically suggests that it is the would-be hooligans and burglars who should be afraid.

The theme of this story is a classically ironic one: too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The parents in the story guarded their house from dangers in every way possible. The used walls, alarms, bars on their windows, automated gates, and barbed wire. Each of these installations increased their protection from the society they could not control until the last one. The barbed wire atop their wall was the last straw. They had gone too far. With their excessive "good things", they brought the very thing they wished to keep out, in. The last sentence is this: "the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-cutters, choppers, and they carried it- the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the weeping gardener- into the house." All the evil they wanted out had come in, due to an ironic twist on an old adage.