Comparing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace

Yann Martel adequately portrays Life of Pi, a story that encompasses elements of Pi, the leading protagonist, and his life in the form of a tragedy. Upon government harassment, Pi’s family’s trip elsewhere commences; here, Pi encounters a foreign tiger and their friendship progressively develops. The tone and style of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi corresponds greatly with Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” “The Necklace” incorporates facets of a tragic story written about a young middle class woman who dreams, desperately, that she were a rich and beautiful lady. She is invited to a party that belonged to her husband’s boss but she quickly declines on account that the clothes she had at the time were unworthy of a fancy party. Her husband spends his money that he had saved up and bought her a dress for the party and she came back saying she had no jewelry and that the other women owned fancy jewelry. She was convinced to ask her friend for some jewelry to borrow and during the time she had lost it. Her and her husband had to get extra jobs just to pay for the lost jewels. They put the cost of the jewels on credit cards and had to pay the money over a period of over ten years. She went out and bought the jewels that looked exactly the same as the ones that were lent to her. Her friend sees her again ten years later after the necklace is all paid for and they talk while she finds out the jewels she lost were fake. These two masterpieces share similar qualities when pertaining to tone and style.

In Life of Pi the author manipulates the simple words he uses to make the reader see what difficult things Pi has to go through not just as a child, but as a boy surviving alone. The way he has us deep in thought on one subject, then he tur...

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...en to Pi on his vast journey through the sea. As the end of “The Necklace” approached and she found out that she bought a legitimate necklace when in reality she should not have, the readers heart melts knowing all of the trouble and hard work she had gone through in order to purchase it. From the point where Pi’s family had all passed away to the end where he walks into the hospital alone in Mexico, the reader feels heart break. These two similarly structured pieces contained a rollercoaster of ideas, thoughts, and emotions that properly made them into the outstanding pieces they are today.

Works Cited

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Print.

Maupassant, Guy de. “The Necklace.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, 4th edition. Edgar V. Roberts. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2008. 4-11. Print.