"As flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course," from "The Ransom of Red Chief" by O. Henry, this quote employs the basic usage of a common literary element, irony. The contradiction between the description and the name of the city for the setting of the story, promotes the use of irony, but is not altogether necessary for the story's plot. This is unlike "The Interlopers" by Saki and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," by Earnest Hemmingway which both require the setting to establish situational irony. If both stories had different settings, they would have never been able to take place and never lead to the protagonists' demises.
             In Saki's, "The Interlopers" he makes use of both verbal and situational irony. Throughout the story it is apparent how the setting, in a forest during a windy night, supports situational irony. It promotes irony in that if it wasn't windy or even in a forest this story could have possibly never happened and "a mass of falling beech tree . . . thundered down on them" trapping them, ultimately ending in their demise would not have happened either. The story begins with Ulrich von Gradwitz in search of "interlopers" on his land and is ironic because the term "interlopers' changes who it is referring to during the course of the story. The reader is first covinced that the trespasser is "Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the quarrel and the tireless game-snatcher and raider of the disputed border-forest." Then finally, in the last line of the story, it becomes clear to the reader that the actual "interlopers" are Georg, Ulrich, and their men, they have been trespassing on the "wolves[ ']" forest. The end of the story also contains verbal comic relief irony when "both men raised their voices in as loud a shout as they could muster" thinking they were ...