In the following passage, would it be correct to say that the bolded sentence uses irony?
She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust,
small- headed man wearing a potato-coloured vest, cleaning the ditch
that runs through the osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down
again into the brown water. As she passes him on the way to the
river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be
cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. She herself has failed. She is not
a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
Best Answer
I would say it depends entirely on her state of mind when she makes this observation - and her state of mind is not clear from the excerpt given.
If she truly believes in that moment that he is better off and she has failed, then it is not ironical. But if this view of things is one she is adopting in a literary way, knowing that it does not really reflect the truth, then you could call it irony.