Willa Cather's Paul's Case and Maupassant's The Necklace

Willa Cather's Paul's Case and Maupassant's The Necklace When comparing two fictional characters from two different writers one must first and foremost analyze their dreams, ambitions, or goals in the story. Whether the character is setting out to accomplish something physically, or they are on a personal or spiritual quest to find themselves. A character's ambitions can reveal a lot of underlying qualities that may not be as apparent at first glance from the reader. While many of the stories we have read this semester contain characters with very obvious similarities, I found that two in particular stood out for me the most. For the purposes of this paper I have chosen to write on Paul from Willa Cather's short story "Paul's Case" and Mathilde in "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant. I found that both of these characters complimented each other very nicely for this assignment, both wish to get a taste of lives they know they cannot have and in the end suffer for the thrill of it. Through the words of the authors we can see how miserable both characters are with their current stations in life and how much they strive to fit in with a "better" crowd. One may also see these characters as naïve, almost deserving of the tragedies that befall them due to the fact that they seem to dismiss their own class as inferior, and envy the upper class in the form of actors, aristocrats, political leaders, and social leaders.

In Cather's story o...

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... was no middle ground only the very poor and the very rich and having no experience with one another's the classes perceptions on each other seem warped in both of these stories. Both of these characters would have averted tragedy had they only stayed within their own social circles… but is this the message we want to walk away from these stories with?

Works Cited: Source: #1 Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 123: Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers: Naturalism and Beyond, 1860-1900. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Catharine Savage Brosman, Tulane University. The Gale Group, 1992. pp. 188-214.

Source #2: Jennifer Hicks An overview of "Paul's Case," in Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Source #3: Kennedy, X.J., and Dana Gioia. Literature An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 9th. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.