Shifting from a bored to happy mood in “Escape”, Rupert Holmes utilizes romantic irony, musical simile, and suburban imagery to convey the idea that it is necessary to escape the “same old dull routine” in order to remember the purpose of life-changing events.
“Escape” is about a man who is sick of his wife and wants someone new. He sees a personal ad and replies with hopes of meeting her. When he does, he finds his own wife. In the line “I didn’t think about my lady, I know that sounds kind of mean” the man clearly does not want to have anything to do with his wife. The irony comes into play in the lines “I knew her smile in an instant, I knew the curve of her face/It was my own lovely lady, and she said ‘Oh, it’s you.’” The man was expecting a beautiful woman he has never met to walk into the bar, but instead he sees his own wife. The irony is also comedic because the couple just goes with it; they laugh and plan their escape despite finding out they both attempted to cheat on one another. The irony in this song shows that he needed to escape his daily routine to realize that he actually loves his wife who he described using a less important but still necessary device, simile.
The man in “Escape” claims that his wife was “like a worn-out recording, of a favorite song.” The “worn-out recording” term can also be applied to his routine. Everything in this man’s life is repetitive and boring. He wanted to break free from it, which is the whole reason why he replied to the ad in the newspaper. To become worn-out, a song must be played so many times. This shows that his life and conversations with his wife were expected and uninteresting. Had his lifestyle been on the boring side of normal instead of repetitive, the man would have never have replied to his wife’s ad, and he would have never escaped and fell in love with his wife again.
The suburban imagery used in this song gives it a story many people can relate to. In the line “I read the paper in bed” the man is portrayed as a normal husband most likely in an average house. The man asks the woman, unknown to him as his wife, to meet him “at a bar called O’Malley’s” to plan their escape. This relates to a lot of people because many couples meet in bars. The descriptions they give of themselves shows that they are like most suburban people. Like many people, the man is “not much into health food”. In the line “if you have half-a-brain”, the woman shows that she wants an average suburban man. She doesn’t want to escape with a college professor nor someone who had not even graduated high school. These lines are important to the song’s story sounding like it could actually happen to a couple.
In “Escape”, Rupert Holmes tells of a couple’s journey to rekindle their love through the use of comedic irony, cliché simile, and relatable imagery. These devices help Holmes’s idea of changing up one’s daily life to remember the good things in life and why certain things were chosen over others to be portrayed in the fun and casual manner used in “Escape”.
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