Arturo Arias in  “Guatemala 1954 — Funeral for a Bird” utilizes irony to expose the near unfathomable horrors left by the bombing experienced through a child’s perspective. The most apparent example is the children’s lack of empathy towards the bodies contrasted with their admiration of the dead bird. Sanchez “in a fit of anger… kicked the corpse” when the corpse becomes an obstacle between him and the dead bird (Arias 51). Furthermore, at that moment, Sanchez “didn’t see the headless body” (Arias 51). For a moment, Sanchez is so consumed by his thoughts of the bird that he literally fails to recognize the human body in front of him. When Sanchez is forced to recognize the body, he does not do so with the same honour as the bird, but rather with contempt. While Arias definitely uses irony to unsettle the reader, perhaps more interestingly, he makes the reader further distrust Sanchez and the narration.

Arias further exposes Sanchez’s fickle (unreliable not as a result of purposeful manipulation, but childish perspective) narration to the reader when he finds the ring to bring as an offering to the bird. When Sanchez finds the ring, he shouts that “I found a ring! A precious ring!” (Arias 53). We only find out after the ring is described in detail that “the finger it encircled also seemed beautiful” (Arias 53). Sanchez is not concerned with the finger: he does not say that he has found a finger, rather just the ring. The reader is forced to recontextualize the ring after finding out that the finger is attached. This further causes the reader to question the narration. 

While we often understand the rhetoric that horrors of war and suffering are unfathomable in children’s eyes, Arias literally makes these horrors unfathomable. The reader never gains access to a version of this story as a normal adult would tell it; instead, we must constantly try to piece together the story narrated through the thoughts of a four-and-a-half-year-old.