Guy de Maupassant has a very unique writing style. As one of “the Fathers
of the Modern Short Story”, he has to be different from the previous writers.
One significant literary device he uses are denouements. But his denouements
aren’t ordinary; his consists of either glorious resolutions or devastating
tragedies. Also, he is an “exemplar of traditional French psychological realism;
he portrays his characters as unhappy victims of their greed, desire, or vanity
but presents even the most sordid details of their lives without sermonizing”
(Answers Encyclopedia 1). These characters are evident throughout many of
Maupassant’s works, including The
Cremation and An Affair of
State.
An Affair of State was a
story which took place almost directly after the successful French Revolution
against Napoleon and the French Empire. A doctor is telling the story about how
he led his men to defeat one of the remaining French Imperial leaders, who was
once his comrade. The doctor devises a plan to fake peace in order to invade
without harm and then they just defeat them and ransack the fortress and destroy
the buffer of Napoleon. The Cremation
is about the legitimate and nationalistic cremation of an Indian Prince in
Britain. It talks about the process in which they had to make a cremation and
the rules people jumped through just because of the nationalism and foreign
imperialism that was involved between Britain and India during that time.
An Affair of State is both
different and similar to The Piece of
String. It is different because An
Affair of State is very realistic and speaks about what may have been a
fictional piece about a true event whereas The
Piece of String isn’t. Also, Maupassant uses a lot of comedy in The
Piece of String whereas An Affair of
State is serious and about political views. They are similar because they
may be connected in the same time period since societies were very advanced by
then and in the Piece of String that
may have been a problem. The Cremation
is mostly different than the Piece
of String because the Cremation
was not fictional nor funny nor ironic but more on a serious, national,
note. The settings are very different and the themes have nothing to do with
each other.
Guy de Maupassant lived from 1850 to 1893. During this time period, the
US rose in power the Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, post
revolution era, the Industrial revolution, the literature revolution using
romanticism and such, rise of civil and racial liberties, equalities, European
imperialism, and much more. All of these things may have played a large part of
Guy de Maupassant’s writings. They may have affected his audience, the social
class that was able to read his works, his civil and social views, his political
views, the effect of industrialization on literature, and rise of literature in
Europe and easier to print books.