The novels of Benito Pérez Galdós reflect the influence of Cervantes, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English authors, the French Romantics, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and many others. Galdós refined the narrative techniques he learned from their novels, and in some respects his original adaptations of the genre were more advanced than those of any other contemporary European author. Galdós' knowledge of Cervantes fostered his own acute use of irony, to which the so-called realist mode of narrative seems naturally inclined. ‘Irony’, Northrop Frye has declared, ‘as a mode, is born from the low mimetic; it takes life exactly as it finds it.’ Sophisticated irony, in its claim to objectivity, refuses to judge life and thus forces the reader to define it for himself.

Although the sense of the term irony may seem intuitively obvious, no single definition will exhaustively comprehend it. Traditionally, it refers to the figure of speech which involves ‘saying one thing and meaning another’. In literary theory of the twentieth century it has come to be used in a much broader sense, to refer to the concept of a relation of disparity or inadequacy. It is in this structural and relational sense that the term is used in the critical theory of Gÿorgy Lukács, Northrop Frye, Wayne Booth, and numerous others. An ironical situation is that which exists between an observer and an observed who is not aware of being observed. The narrative situation of the reader and that which he reads, for example, can therefore be seen as intrinsically ironic. Scholes and Kellogg have written in The Nature of Narrative that ‘The narrative situation is thus ineluctably ironical.