• Guy de Maupassant used irony and sarcasm in “Was It a Dream?” to denote that true love can still exist in a deceitful society through the man’s love for his wife.
I. Portrayal of true love was exhibited with a sense of exaggeration.
A. The man’s dialogue expressed his great love for his wife.
1. He speaks like he was the only who had loved her madly.
2. His thoughts only contain the memories that they’ve shared together.
3. His dialogue expresses how he greatly suffered from the death of his lover.
B. The narrator’s actions were too sarcastic.
1. He was so desperate to be with his wife even for the last time that he made a mad wish to weep on her grave, all-night long.
II. With a sense of irony, deception was illustrated when the narrator visited the cemetery.
A. Dead people rose from their graves and changed what was engraved in their tombstones.
1. He found out the truth hid by the townspeople that these innocent, faultless men and women were hypocrites, liars, and wicked ones.
B. He found his wife and saw that she was doing the same thing with the other dead people.
1. He discovered that his lover tried to deceive him the night he found her wet from rain.
III. CONCLUSION
A. Guy de Maupassant denotes that too much love may deceive one’s mind.
B. Guy de Maupassant implies that not even death would prevent truth from revealing itself.
C. Guy de Maupassant concludes that true love does not find any fault; it sees only the beauty of loving.
D. Guy de Maupassant implies that everything we see is not what we always get.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
1) How did Guy de Maupassant define true love in the story?
2) What is Guy de Maupassant’s purpose in writing this story? Is it to describe true love or to uncover the deception of the society?
3) How did his interpretation of true love and deception differ from the other authors?
4) What influenced him to create such story? Is it a social or political problem?
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