I don't know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.
The opening line sets up the tone of the rest: conversational and understated. The name of the “little town” is introduced to readers and if one wasn’t aware that it is a story about a small town in Canada, that information is there as well.
But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for Zena Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide (oh, yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell you), had it not been for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in cold reality between him and Zena.
The irony at work in the story is that of the absurdly humorous kind rather than the corrosively satirical. This is in keeping with the focus on a small town. Harshly vitriolic Swiftian satire would seem out of place, but the sheer ridiculousness of asserting that Peter Pupkin (or anyone else) actually committed suicide three times is the sort of understated absurdity that has come to be associated with small close-knit towns in everything from the movie Local Hero to the Australian TV series The Strange Calls.
But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way to it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this Mausoleum Club in the city.
The first-person narrator directly addresses the reader in the second person. This is not just some empty technique; the “you” implicates the reader specifically as a former resident of Mariposa who has since moved away and become a success in business. The reader (you) are essentially getting caught up on the latest news (gossip) such as happens every day when old friends reconnect. In this particular instance, the re-connection is taking place at a gentlemen’s club of the type that don’t really exist anymore called Mausoleum Club. The fact that the narrator is a member hints at something more about his character.
By the last chapter, from which this quote is taken, it is quite clear that the “you” is most certainly situated as a former resident of Mariposa who had left long ago and recent returned. n light of that opening line. Strange then, though, when you go back and read the opening line.
Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very careful thought. It often involves serious consequences, and in some cases brings pain to others than oneself. I don't say that there is no justification for it. There often is. Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon the concertina, will admit that there are some lives which ought not to be continued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
This passage reveals that though the irony and political satire is suitable tame enough to describe the goings-on within a small town, the actual character of the narrator is more complex than it may seem. Conversational he may be, but often the tone of the conversation is different from the reader than it is for the narrator. The reader can easily intuit that the assertions above about suicide are intended to be taken ironically (except, perhaps, for the part about musicians and poetry doing the world a solid), but by the time the reader has reached this point in the narrative, it will have become clear that the ironic is unintended on the part of the narrator. He is actually quite sincere in this and multiple other observations that the reader knows the author intends to be ironic. The conduit is the narrator and less attentive and intuitive readers could certainly read all the way through without realizing just how deeply ironic it all is.
