English Honors
Period 6
Compare and Contrast Essay In life some people think all you need in life to survive and be happy is love, but others thinking that money is the answer to life’s problems. In the stories “The Necklace” and “The Gift of the Magi” it portrays the lives of two main characters that deal with problems of their own. One dong it out of love, and the other for greed. Within both stories there are many differences and similarities that deal with how they handle their situations. In the story “The Necklace” the main character, Mathilda Losisel, is unhappily married to a clerk, and is ungrateful of the life she is living. She thinks that she deserves to be living a better lifestyle, and that materialistic objects and fancy things will make her happy rather than love. Mathilda is invited to the ball in the beginning of the story, and immediately she turns selfish and wants her husband to get the things she desires for her ball. Her husband tries everything he can to please his wife in every way that he could do to try to make her happy. Not once in the story did she say thank you for her husband’s efforts because she wasn’t thankful for what he had done for her. She also borrows an expensive necklace from one of her close friends. As she was partying away at the ball, she did not once think about her husband. She was more focused on the fact that other people were giving her attention. Later on in the story Mathilda loses the necklace, and her husband does everything he can to try to get it back. He ended up getting money to buy a brand new necklace, but had to pay off debts he had from raising that money by working it off and Mathilda has to work it off as well. Because of Mathilda’s greed and ignorance it had lead her to the situation of debt she was in. Throughout the story she only worried about herself rather than thinking about how much effort her husband was doing to making her happy. In the end the necklace turned out to