The Monkeys Paw compared with The Third Wish
The Monkeys Paw compared with The Third Wish
In this essay, I am going to compare and contrast “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Third Wish.” “The Monkey’s paw” written by W. W. Jacobs is about a family who gets a strange monkey’s paw which grants them three wishes. And in “The Third Wish” a man frees a swan from a tangled bush and in return for saving it, the swan grants him three wishes.
The wishes in both stories are almost the same because both the White’s family and Mr. Peters wanted a happy life. In “The Monkey’s Paw” Mr. White wished for five hundred dollars to pay off their house mortgage, this way they didn’t have any thing to worry about. In “The Third wish” Mr. Peter wishes for a “wife as beautiful as the forest,” who can mend his socks and cook him dinner and love him forever.
Another point that is the same in both stories is the climaxes. In ‘The Monkey’s Paw” Mr. White after frantically searching for the paw that he dropped a while ago, undoes his second wish because he couldn’t stand seeing his dead son with some of his body parts missing. In “The third wish” Mr. Peters uses his second wish to wish back his wife to being a swan because he had seen how lonely his wife was and he would notice how pale and sick his wife would get.
In addition to that another point that is the same is that Mrs. White and Leita are both unhappy after the first wish. Leita is unhappy after the first wish because she wants to be a swan again and she wants to be with her sister but she can’t be because she is married to Mr. Peters and she doesn’t want to make him unhappy. Mrs. White is unhappy after the first wish because when Mr. White made the first wish for five hundred dollars, the very next day, Herbert, their son got killed in a machinery at work. And as gratitude the boss gave them five hundred dollars.
A point that is different is this story is the theme. In ‘The third Wish” the theme is “You don’t need to wish to have a happy life. And in “The Monkey’s paw” the theme is “Be careful for what you wish for.” In one story the meaning of the theme...