The case of Paul by Willa Cather and the necklace by Maupassant When we compare two fictional characters from two different writers, we must first of all analyze their dreams, their ambitions or objectives in history. Whether the character is seeking to accomplish something physically or is on a personal or spiritual quest to find themselves. A character's ambitions can reveal many underlying qualities that may not be as apparent at first glance to the reader. Although many of the stories we read this semester contained characters with very obvious similarities, I found that two in particular stood out to me the most. For the purposes of this article, I chose to write about Paul in the short story “The Case of Paul” by Willa Cather and about Mathilde in “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant. I found these two characters to compliment each other very nicely on this mission, both wanting a taste of lives they know they can't have and ending up suffering from the thrill of it. Through the authors' words, we can see how unhappy both characters are with their current situations in life and how hard they are trying to fit into a "better" crowd. We can also view these characters as naive, almost deserving the tragedies that befall them due to the fact that they seem to reject their own class as inferior and envy the upper class in the form of actors, aristocrats, political leaders and social actors. leaders. In Cather's story o...... middle of paper ...... there was no middle ground only the very poor and the very rich and having no experience with each other , the classes' perceptions of each other seem distorted in both cases. of these stories. These two characters would have avoided tragedy if they had only stayed within their own social circles...but is that the message we want to walk away from these stories with? French Fiction Writers of the Century: Naturalism and Beyond, 1860-1900. A secular book by Bruccoli Clark. Edited by Catharine Savage Brosman, Tulane University. The Gale Group, 1992. pp. 188-214. Source #2: Jennifer Hicks An overview of “Paul's Case,” in Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997. Source #3: Kennedy, XJ and Dana Gioia. Literature An introduction to fiction, poetry and drama. 9th. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.