Irony in Two Short Stories

¶ … Irony in Two Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" One of the most notable features of both "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe and "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant is the ways these two short stories effectively use irony to engage the reader's interest in an otherwise unlikeable protagonist. The narrator of Poe's story is a murderer, a paranoid and mentally unstable individual who kills an old man merely because he dislikes the way the old man looks at him.

The more the unnamed narrator insists that he is sane, the more the reader, along with everyone else around the man, is certain that the narrator is insane. The tension between the narrator's self-perception and the way the narrator is perceived by other characters propels the plot forward almost as much as the question of if and when his crime will be revealed to the world.

Poe's narrator, after his repeated insistence that the old man deserved to die to the reader, ends the story by believing that the old man he killed is still alive, despite the fact that he dismembered the man's corpse. He is certain that the man's heart is still beating below the floorboards where the corpse is buried.

The murderer's strange behavior reveal his guilt, of course, but the supposed beating of the dead man's heart also symbolizes how what the narrator really wants to kill, namely his own inner demons that he projected onto the old man. These inner demons still alive and do not die with the death of an innocent person.

The narrator's inability to see reality clearly is also manifest in the fact that he believes that the authorities, clued onto the crime because of the murdered man's scream in the night, can hear the pulsating beat of the titular tell-tale heart beneath the floorboards. Poe's protagonist believes the police are taunting him with the composure they manifest, and the sound of the heart (in reality only audible to the murderer in his demented mind) reveals his crime to everyone.

Ironically, the paranoia that gave rise to the crime also results in the discovering of the murderous crime. The Necklace" is narrated in the third-person omniscient voice of the author Guy de Maupassant, unlike the tale of "The Tell-Tale Heart." The central character of "The Necklace" is a spoiled young woman who believes that her beauty places her above her material circumstances and her husband.

She borrows a necklace from a friend to compliment her evening attire, becomes the belle of a ball for evening, but because she loses the borrowed necklace, she must sacrifice her beauty and life to get a replacement of the jewel so as not to be indebted to the older, wealthier woman who lent the necklace. Eventually, when the lender discovers what the heroine has suffered, she is horrified -- the necklace, despite the fact that it looked like a valuable jewel, was in fact paste or false.

The irony of the story lies in the fact that Mathilde has given her life to repay back a debt to Madame Forstier that she never really owed, only believed she owed when she heard the price from the jeweler of what the real version of such a necklace would cost. Seeking transitory happiness at a single ball, she gives away everything that was valuable to her -- her beauty, the little status she had, and her aspirations to wealth and status.

If she had been content with her original dress and content with her original circumstances, she never would have suffered such a horrible deception and loss of her fortunes. She also learns, too late, that the jewels and the life she coveted so long ago was a sham. Hence, the symbolic nature of the necklace itself -- although it appears to have great value, it is in fact only real in appearance, not in reality and the heroine is incapable of assessing the false necklace's true worth.

The tale of "The Necklace" conveys the moral that what is real, the replacement she returned to Madame Forstier, can be won not with beauty but with hard work, sweat, and toil. Like "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Necklace" revolves around the use of irony and a single, symbolic element, exemplified in the title object that works throughout the tale, using the literary device of irony, to reveal the protagonist's moral character.

That final revelation engineered by the title object makes the story compelling, even if both protagonists may seem morally repugnant. The tone of the stories, one of creeping horror in Poe, versus the lighter and more cruelly humorous tone of "The Necklace" may differ, but ultimately both strive to show the false world-view of the protagonist embodied in both the heart and the piece of false jewelry. In contrast, the central character of Guy de Maupassant's "A Piece of String" is a fairly likeable individual, an honest peasant.

He is a man so honest in fact, that he is physically as well as emotionally and socially crippled by allegations that he failed to return a lost wallet. The title of the story, like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Necklace" refers to the single, physical symbolic element of the tale, around which the story revolves. However, rather than symbolizing the protagonist's guilt or shallowness, the string refers to the innocent action of the man, as he picked up a piece of string from the dirt.

That one action caused him to be blamed for refusing to return a wallet containing five hundred francs. No one believes the man, and.