I am a great admirer of Paul Fussell’s ‘The Great War in Modern Memory’. Fussell writes eloquently and persuasively about the relationship between language, literature, action and cognition. Interviewees, he found, often recalled incidents from the war precisely because they were ironic: the irony of a man being ‘comforted’ by a friend, oblivious to the terrible injuries sustained by the friend; the stumbling across of a corpse of a family member; and so on, and so on.
This resonates with ironies about how gratitude is received and remembered. Many of the anecdotes told to me by doctors involve irony. The irony of a mental health patient railing against being sectioned by a doctor who feels dreadful about the situation, only to be profusely thanked for ‘saving my life’ by the patient some months later.