1. From what he has seen, what does the man think of the mechanism by which he'll be hanged?

The man thinks that the mechanism is terrible and that he will be able to end his life without difficulties. This is something he would like to avoid, because he wanted to go back to his family.

Explanation:

This question is about "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" which tells the story of a Confederate man who is about to be hanged by the Union Army. While the soldiers of the union are preparing all the machinery that will hang him, the man enters a wave of stress that causes all his senses to intensify. With that, the man has a much greater perception of things and when he sees the apparatus that will hang him, he has the perception that it will be agonizing and that it will finish him off in seconds.

Irony can be tough to write because first you have to notice something ironic to write about a situation, which is a kind of insight. That’s also why it’s a fairly impressive writing technique. So the trick is not to practice writing irony but to practice noticing it. Look around you every day, and you will see plenty of ways in which ordinary expectations are contradicted by what happens in the real, unpredictable world.As you look around for irony, take care to avoid the pitfall of confusing irony with coincidence. Often coincidences are ironic, and often they are not. Think of it this way: a coincidence would be if firemen, on the way home from putting out a fire, suddenly got called back out to fight another one. Irony would be if their fire truck caught on fire. The latter violates our expectations about fire trucks, whereas the former is just an unfortunate (but not necessarily unexpected) turn of events.

Another way of putting it is this: coincidence is a relationship between  facts (e.g. Fire 1 and Fire 2), whereas irony is a relationship between a fact and an expectation and how they contradict each other.

When to use irony

Irony belongs more in creative writing than in formal essays. It’s a great way of getting a reader engaged in a story, since it sets up expectations and then provokes an emotional response. It also makes a story feel more lifelike, since having our expectations violated is a universal experience. And, of course, humor is always valuable in creative writing.

Verbal irony is also useful in creative writing,