Comparing Maupassants Necklace and Chekovs Vanka Essay

Narrators and Sympathy in Maupassants Necklace and Chekovs Vanka In Guy de The Necklace and Anton Chekovs Vanka, the narrators attitudes are unsympathetic toward the protagonists Mathilde and Vanka. However, where the narrator of The Necklace feels outright hostility toward Mathilde, the narrator of Vanka voices his opinion more passively by pointing out the flaws in Vankas wishful thinking. In The Necklace, the narrators unsympathetic feelings toward Mathilde are made evident in the first paragraph when he states, she had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded by an rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public†¦show more content†¦Eel is beaten several times a day for various reasons, presumably by Vankas grandfather; therefore, if Vanka should live with him, he would probably be beaten as well (47). In fact, Vanka tells his grandfather that he can thrash [him] like Sidors goat if he misbehaves or does something wrong (48). The narrator of The Necklace shows that Mathilde is a shallow person due to her insistence that she would not go to the ball without a new dress, and that she would only wear jewels, never flowers, although they were in fashion (67-68). Mathilde appears to be more concerned with how everybody thinks she looks, than how they actually think of her as a person. Mathilde furthers this impression when she and Loisle are leaving the dance and she would rather be in the cold than have the other ladies see them in their modest wraps of common life (69). However, the narrator of Vanka further portrays Vanka as a sympathetic, but naive, character. In his letter, Vanka writes about how he is beaten several times a day and frequently goes hungry because as for tea, or soup, the master and mistress gobble it all up themselves (48). He would even run away to the village, but [he has] no boots even though he works for a shoemaker (48). The fact that Vanka writes to his grandfather in secret with an old pen he had salvaged further shows how scared of his master he is in that he hides his actions for fear of receiving