Selfishness Among Characters

Characters in the stories we have read so far this semester have been faced with a multitude of problems, emotions and impulses to work through. It seems that from three stories the characters carry out very different actions, but they all have an underlying bond, selfishness and the desire to be something there not. It also seems that they are judged in the eyes of the narrator, as either succeeding or failing due to the way they carried themselves throughout the story. In the short story, “A Pair of Silk Stockings”, by Kate Chopin, the main character, Mrs. Sommers, after finding fifteen dollars plans do things with it for her kids, and her family. However, this all changed after, buying a pair of expensive silk stockings for herself. She just totally forgets about all the nice things she was going to do with the money for her kids, for instance buy them new cloths for once in their lives. Once she put those silk stockings on, she received a small taste of the good life, and the greed and selfishness set in. She wanted more of it. So, she goes off and treats herself to things of a higher class, deep down knowing that she didn’t belong where she was, for example, in the theater or going to a nice restaurant for lunch. At the end it seems that she has no recollection of her life before this day had begun. She was so wrapped up in assuming the identity of a wealthy person under false pretenses. The way that the narrator was telling the story, the main character Mrs. Sommers, both Succeeds and fails at the same time. She succeeds in the sense of fooling people and also herself into believing that she is a member of the upper class, at the same time failing in her responsibilities to her family of being a responsible mother. In the second story, we read by Kate Chopin, “Regret”, the main character, Mamzelle Aurelie, has a selfishness to her, that to me was a somewhat a good kind of selfishness, unlike Mrs. Sommers. She was a

Cited: Chopin, Kate. “The Awakening”. Penguin Books USA. New York. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Great Gatsby”. Simon and Schuster. New York.