Sobbing Children (Situational Irony)
During their first night at the mansion house, Penny and Primrose expect the other evacuated children are about to begin laughing, teasing, and playing. They both fear the others will form a gang and harass them. However, in an instance of situational irony, the other children are just as frightened and confused by having been sent out of the city as Penny and Primrose are. Rather than become rowdy, the children suppress their sobs by pressing their faces into their pillows.
Parallel Lives (Situational Irony)
After Primrose and Penny go to stay with different families, their lives follow similar paths. They both lose their fathers during the war, they both remain unmarried and childless throughout their lives, and they both have professions that involve intimate understandings of children's psychology. In this instance of situational irony, both women's lives are shaped in the same mold because of their encounter with the Thing in the forest.
Telling the Story (Dramatic Irony)
"The Thing in the Forest" ends with Primrose entertaining as Aunty Primrose to an audience of children at a mall. Earlier in the story, the narrator comments on how Primrose never sets her scarier stories in the woods. However, once the children have assembled on their chairs, she begins to tell them the story of two young girls who once saw, or believed they saw, something in the forest. In this instance of dramatic irony, the reader understands Primrose is turning her traumatic memory into a fairytale. The children, meanwhile, are oblivious to the fact that Primrose is using fantastical material drawn from her own life.
