Poetic Justice

Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct.

Examples

• "For 'tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard." (Shakespeare, Hamlet (III.iv.226).)
• The story of Esther includes two instances of poetic justice, both involving Haman. Ultimately, Haman is executed on the gallows that he had prepared for Esther's cousin Mordecai.
• Dante’s Divine Comedy reads like a compendium of examples of poetic justice.
• The self-fulfilling prophecy can be considered an early example of poetic justice. One example of this is the ancient Sabskrit story of Krishna, where King Kamsa is told in a prophecy that a child of his sister Devaki would kill him. In order to prevent it, he imprisons both Devaki and her husband Vasudeva, allowing them to live only if they hand over their children as soon as they are born. He murders nearly all of them one by one, but the eighth child, Krishna, is saved and raised by a cowherd couple, Nanda and Yasoda. After growing up and returning to his kingdom, Krishna eventually kills Kamsa. In other words, Kamsa's cruelty in order to prevent his death is what led to him being killed.
• "The Shawshank Redemption"
• The Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons feature repeated instances of poetic justice, as Wile E. Coyote always sets traps for Road Runner, only to end up in the traps himself.
• In The X Files episode "Darkness Falls," Mulder theorizes that a group of missing loggers are victims of attacks by extinct insects released from dormancy when the loggers cut down a 700 year-old tree. An environmental activist named Doug Spinney, who previously exposed the cut-down tree as one deliberately marked to be protected, then remarks, "That would be rather poetic justice, don't you think? Unleashing the very thing that would end up killing them?"
• Many episodes of The Twilight Zone feature poetic justice, usually due to an ironic twist.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_justice