Dreams of Fishkind

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Ramanjot Dhillon Mr. Desjardins ENG4U0-G February 12th, 2014 Deception and Truth Although humans look to love, being naive will only bring disappointment and grief. In the short story "Was it a Dream?", Guy de Maupassant tries to implement the idea that nobody can be trusted. To begin with, the protagonist (who remains unnamed) is a man in the midst of grieving the loss of his partner. We are quickly acknowledged to the fact that the man is a very loving and caring person, and so was his wife. However, as much as he trusted his wife and loves her, she does not feel the same way: " Having gone out in the rain one day, in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold and died." (153). Quickly we realize that his wife was not as loving, caring, or faithful as him because she was going to deceive her man had it not been such a dreadful outcome, her death. The man always thought his partner loved him back equally as much as he loved her, perceiving almost a perfect relationship to the reader. Not only do we come to the conclusion that she was unfaithful, we begin to wonder if what we know about the protagonist could be "deceiving". Second, Guy de Maupassant presents deception not only through the actions of the living, but also the dead. Later on in the story, the protagonist heads to the cemetery to spend the night weeping on his partners grave. Furthermore, one of the crosses at the cemetery said "Here lies Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He loved his family, was kind and honorable, and died in the grace of the Lord." (152). The epitaphs of the dead are merely a deceiving judgement of who they were when they were alive: "He slowly effaced them, and with the hollows of his eyes he looked at the places where they had been engraved. Then with the tip of the bone that had been his forefinger, he wrote in luminous letters: 'Here reposes Jacques
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