Blanca Smith Basic English Oral presentation: Analysis of a Short Story. Professor Jenny Lopez.

Oral Report for The Necklace For my report, I chose to read The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant. This story talks about a woman who is attractive but poor, but who desires to have the life of rich people, with the nice things rich people have. She lives the simple life of a wife of an accounting clerk in Paris, France. She is sad because she does not have nice clothes or jewelry but only has simple clothes. One day, her husband comes home with invitations to a party with the Minister of Education and his wife. Instead of feeling happy, she feels sad because she does not have nice clothes or jewelry to wear to the party. Her nice husband decides to provide her with money to buy a nice dress. After buying her dress, she is still sad because of not having any jewelry to go along with it. Her husband suggests she visit her friend to borrow some jewelry. When visiting her friend, she finds a beautiful necklace she thinks is very fancy and expensive. She borrows this and along with the dress, wears these to the party. She has a very good time at the party. Later, when leaving the party with her husband and getting home, they discover she has lost the necklace she borrowed. Her husband looks everywhere around the city for the necklace but cannot find it. Later when he gets home after not finding it, they decide they need to buy another necklace to replace the one they lost.

They borrow money and put themselves into deep debt in order to buy an expensive necklace. The woman works at hard labor jobs for 10 years in order to pay back the debts. Later she sees her friend from whom she borrowed the necklace and decides to tell her what happened. She told her how she lost the necklace and bought a new, expensive one to replace it, and how she worked too hard to pay back the debts from buying it. Her friend told her that her necklace was not a real expensive one but was only a cheap imitation. In this story, we can see that it is better to be satisfied with what things we have instead of desiring to have things we do not have. Also it is better to tell people what happened truthfully instead of going through the trouble of covering something up and putting ourselves through a lot of trouble in fixing the bad situation we caused. I enjoyed this story a lot and learned something after reading it. This concludes my oral report.