Vendetta

The Vendetta

Guy de Maupassant was born in France in 1850.Maupassant developed to be one of the most famous short story writers of all time.

In the short story 'A Vendetta' the title is a glimpse into the plotnof the story, telling us that that there is a vendetta involved but doesn't reveal the nature of the vendetta and its aims. There are 3 main characters in the story, they are, Widow Saverini, Frisky the dog, and Nicolas Ravolati.

The story is about, an assassin Nicolas Ravolati kills Widow Saverini's son Antoine during a quarrel and over the dead body of her son Widow Saverini swears vengance. She is unable to sleep until she has an idea. She trains her dog Frisky to attack a dummy, by starving her of food and hiding sausage inside the dummy's torso. The widow takes the dog to Nicolas' Sardinian hideout and at the widows' word the dog kills Nicolas Ravolati.

The moral of the story is that revenge can become destructive and obsessive if we allow it to do so. Maupassant expresses this moral when, In the story he talks about the Widow Saverini being unable to sleep or make peace until she can complete this vendetta of when she sleeps soundly.

Style/Tone:
'A Vendetta' was strictly written in a narrative and descriptive format, with the given tones of seriousness, distant, emotional attributions and the contribution of a negative/aggressive diction.

During this story Guy de Maupassant uses several different literary techniques to help express his views and to help explain and tell the story.

Onomatopoeia that make the literal sound.“All day long and all night long the dog howled.” Imagery creating a visual description if mental images, figures or likenesses of things:
“Paolo Saverini’s widow lived alone with her son in a poor little house on the ramparts of Bonifacio.”
“At its foot, on the other side and almost completely surrounding it, is the channel that serves as its harbor, cuе in the cliff like a gigantic corridor.”

Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for Somerset Maugham and O. Henry in this respect. His stories about expensive jewellery ("The Necklace", "La parure") are imitated with a twist by Maugham ("Mr Know-All", "A String of Beads") and Henry James ("Paste").
Taking his cue from Balzac, Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-Realist and fantastic modes; stories and novels such as "L'Héritage" and Bel-Ami aim to recreate Third Republic France in a realistic way, whereas many of the short stories (notably "Le Horla" and "Qui sait?") describe apparently supernatural phenomena.
The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists' troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry, and attended the public lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot between 1885 and 1886. This interest is reflected in his fiction.