Views about wealth can be different from every people. Some believes that wealth can solve every problem and provide happiness and others believe that wealth is not really the most important thing in the world. It just depends on what the person wants from being wealthy or how they want to use it in their lives. Two authors, Guy de Maupassant the author of “The Necklace”, and Chinua Achebe the author of “Civil Peace”, wrote short stories where views on materialism are portrayed by characters in similar and in different ways. Madame Loisel from “The Necklace” is a middle class woman who always dreams of becoming rich but ended being poor because of valuing the necklace more than anything to her that caused her happiness at first but years of suffering after . In the “Civil Peace” where the main character Jonathan Iwegbu got robbed by the thieves and portrayed his view on materialis
The characters of Jonathan Iwegbu and Mathilde Loisel are similar in some ways. One would be that both characters are
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For instance, Jonathan is optimistic whereas Mathilde is pessimistic. Jonathan view things in positive way such as when he and his family survives from the civil war saying “Happy Survival” and when he found his bike mentioning that it is a “bonus” and a “miracle” (p.). The attitude of Jonathan shows that even though he doesn’t have much rather than the “five heads” of him and his family and his bicycle; he is still grateful for what he has and he viewed it as “blessings” in his life. However, Mathilde is different from Jonathan because she’s living in a middle class, she has a servant that cleans for her, and a husband who is a “minor civil servant in the Ministry of Education” but just she ignores these beautiful things and she wants something worthier. Another differences is that Loisel values material things and Iwegbu values his family