The Secret Life of the Necklace

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For my final paper I have decided to do a contrast and comparison on “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber and “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant. I will compare the usage of themes, character roles such as Protagonist and Antagonist, tools of characteristics, narrator point of view, genre, tone and settings within these two stories, along with the contrast to the best of my ability. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" tells the story of the aging Walter Mitty on a trip into town with his overbearing wife, Mrs. Mitty. Walter is inept at many things; he is an absent-minded driver, he can't handle simple mechanical tasks, and he forgets things easily. What makes Walter exceptional is his imagination. While Walter goes through a day of tasks and errands, he escapes into a series of fantasies, each spurred on by reality. As he drives his car, he imagines he is commanding "a Navy hydroplane" through a storm. (Clugston, 2010) When he rides past a hospital, he imagines he is a world-famous surgeon saving a person's life. When he hears a newsboy shouting about a trial, he imagines he is a crack shot being interrogated in the case. As he waits for his wife to finish at the hairdresser's, Walter sees pictures of German plane and imagines he is a British pilot. Lastly, as Mitty waits outside against a wall for his wife to buy something in a drugstore, he fantasizes that he is a bold and brave man about to be shot by a firing squad. The story ends with Walter Mitty awaiting his death. At the beginning of the story “The Necklace” we meet Mathilde Loisel, a middle-class girl who desperately wishes she were wealthy. She's got looks and charm, but had the bad luck to be born into a family of clerks, who married her off to a clerk in the Department of Education. Mathilde is so convinced she's meant to be rich that she detests her real life and spends all day dreaming
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