“The Wrong Man”
This collection kicks off with a demonstration of Larsen’s almost obsessive interest in ironic endings. The story is about a woman attending an upscale party with her husband when she spots a man from her past whom she never told her husband about. She spends most of the story angling to get the other man alone to plead with him not to spill the beans and finally finds herself alone with him and makes her case. Unfortunately, she only thought she was with her former lover, but it turns out she just confessed the whole sordid affair to the wrong man, a complete stranger.
"Freedom"
This short-short story is told completely as an interior monologue of sorts about a man looking back on a relationship with an unidentified woman who had been his entire universe for three years. He muses about the ways he can “contrive to get himself out of the slough into which his amorous folly had precipitated him” and briefly considers that she might die before admitting that she would outlive him just to spite him. That thought somehow frees him to consider traveling to China and the South Seas because now “Gladness flooded him. He was free.” The irony is twofold: she was already dead from complications of childbirth at the moment he wished her dead and rather than being free to travel and enjoy life, his story ends with suicide.
"Sanctuary"
The irony in this story may be the most bitter pill to swallow for some readers. A woman learns that her son has been killed and she offers sanctuary to his murderer to protect him from white justice. She only protects him because he’s black; there is no other reason. It is an irony perhaps impossible for much of the population to ever understand, much less accept as realistic.
"Passing"
Passing for white as a light-skinned mixed-race person is done with the intention of improving the quality of life and, therefore, being happier. But the decision to pass is made at the expense of identity, just like the decision not to pass. Either way, one is sacrificing half their cultural background and the result if a sense of isolation on both sides in which longing for what could be or what isn’t breaks down the very ability to enjoy what is. This inherent irony is put most explicitly on display by Clare in one of her letters:
“For I am lonely, so lonely…You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of.”
"Quicksand"
While in Denmark, far away from American-style racism, Helga Crane has an epiphany:
“How stupid she had been ever to have thought that she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color! She saw, suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage.”
By the end of the novel, Helga has long since returned home to America and the irony of the novel’s concluding lines are crystal clear:
“hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.”
