Alliteration In The Gift Of The Magi
Alliteration In The Gift Of The Magi - Our editors will review your submission and decide whether to revise the article. Our editors will review your submission and decide whether to revise the article. The Gift of the Magi, a short story by O. Henry, published in the New York Sunday World in 1905 and then collected in The Four Million (1906).
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Alliteration In The Gift Of The Magi
The story is about James and Della Dillingham Young, a young couple who, despite their poverty, decide on their own to give each other a beautiful gift on Christmas Eve. Della sells her beautiful long hair to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim's old gold watch.
Meanwhile, Jim pawns his precious watch to buy jeweled tortoiseshell combs for Della's precious necklace. 'The Gift of the Magi' is a short story by the short story writer from the United States O. Henry, real name William Sydney Porter (1862-1910). His stories are characterized by their irony, talkative narrative style, casual tone, and dramatic ending.
All these things became a characteristic feature, and 'Gift of the Wizards' incorporates them to some extent. But what does this Christmas story mean? You can read 'The Gift of the Magi' here before continuing to our summary and analysis of O. Henry's story below.
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We will discuss some of the main themes of 'Gift of the Wizards' in a separate post. It's Christmas Eve. Jim and Della are a married couple living in a sparsely furnished apartment in New York. They don't have much money. The story opens with Della upset because she only has one dollar and eighty seven cents to spend on a Christmas present for her husband.
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The narrator tells us that the married couple have a property that they are proud of. For Jim, it was his father's gold watch, and before that, his grandfather's. Della's prized possession is her beautiful hair. Della goes to a woman who deals in hair products.
This woman agrees to buy Della's hair for twenty dollars. With the newly acquired money, Della goes to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim's gold watch. This costs her twenty one dollars, leaving her with only eighty seven cents in the whole world. When she gets home, she's going to curl what's left of her hair so it's visible.
When James arrives home, he is surprised at how his wife has done, but when he explains why her hair was cut off, he hugs her and gives her the gift he bought her: two combs jeweled tortoise shells that she has admired for a long time.
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shop window. The combs are of no use to her until her hair grows out again, but at least she can give her gift to Jim... But in a final twist, Jim tells Della that he sold his gold watch to pay for the expensive combs she bought.
So now, she has two combs but no hair to use, and has a platinum fob chain for a gold watch she no longer owns. Many of O. Henry's short stories - most of which run to just five or six pages - are characterized by their ironic twists, and 'Rodd y Dewiniaid' is a good example of this characteristic of his work.
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In their efforts to buy each other their ideal Christmas present, young Jim and Della sacrifice the very things their gifts are designed to add: the combs for Della's hair (which are sold), and the chain for Jim's watch (sold). As the narrator observes in the last paragraph: The magicians, as you know, were wise men - wonderfully wise men - giving gifts to the Child in the manger.
They invented the art of Christmas gift giving. As they are wise, no doubt their gifts are wise, perhaps with the privilege of exchange for fear of duplication. And here I painfully tell you the unforgivable story of two foolish children in an apartment who unwisely sacrificed to each other the greatest treasure of the house.
But O. Henry does not invite us to laugh at their folly, but to celebrate their sacrifice. In fact, it was not folly that inspired them but wisdom, as the narrator notes in the closing words of the story: But in a final word about the wise men these days it can be said that these two are the wisest of all those who give gifts.
Of all those who give and receive gifts, as the wisest. Everywhere they are smarter. They are the magicians. So there are, in a sense, two surprising twists at the end of 'The Gift of the Wizards': the typical plot twist which characterizes most of O. Henry's short stories, and the narrative 'twist' in it is reversed
our first answer. - who could naturally laugh at an unhappy turn of events just recounted - and make a moral point that Jim and Della acted out of wisdom, even though they ended up with 'useless' gifts from each other. This is all well and good, but it's worth noting that the narrator doesn't explain why he thinks Jim and Della were the "smartest" of all the presents.
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In fact, 'wise' is suggested here by the Magi, the Zoroastrian astrologers who, in the Gospel of Matthew, visited the baby Jesus and brought him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh: hence the title of the story. But what makes Jim and Della wise? And why doesn't O. Henry tell us?
Was it because he wanted us to make up our own minds, or did he assume that the middle answer was self-explanatory? The latter seems more likely. 'The Magician's Gift' is certainly 'moral', with its festive setting and the fact that Jim and Della clearly love each other and treat each other well despite not having the money for the best things in
life to pay, is that love. it is more important than possessions. And when it comes to Christmas and buying gifts for our loved ones, it's the thought that really counts. But there is a little more to 'The Gift of the Magi' than this rather hackneyed old saying, which would reduce the story to a silly and somewhat clichéd story about 'giving is better than receiving' and 'love is more important than
money'. These two statements are relevant to the story, but what is also relevant is the element of sacrifice that the two characters make, and their reaction to learning the consequences of this. So Jim is happy to part with a gold watch that has been passed down the male line for three generations, while Della is happy to lose her hair (which, despite her protests, would take several months to grow back
to total) to buy . the gift the other desires. But with the twist of the story, they learn that their personal sacrifices - devoted to their love for the other - have been in vain. But they are happy about this, not because of the impulse to buy the gift but because of the great expense the other person has gone to.
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