Down the Wrong Path

Life is built differently every day according to the choices we make. Every decision we make will have a result, some results might be good, other results might be bad, and even a single choice can result in death as the maximum prize. The objective of this essay is to compare two characters from different stories that learned something through a specific event or experience. This essay will analyze the histories “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov and “The Interlopers” by Saki. These two stories will mostly be compared on the choices that the character made, how they were affected by it, and a conclusion based on their past events.

“The Bet” by Anton Chekhov, is a story about two young men that were discussing about how capital punishment had to be replaced by imprisonment for life. For one of the young men, the banker, capital punishment was more moral than imprisonment for life because it killed the prisoner slowly, rather than the capital penalty killed him in minutes. On the other hand, the other man opposed to this thought. He said, “The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at all.”(Chekhov 1) The result of this event was a bet in which one of the young men had to proof that he could be imprisoned for fifteen years; In return, the banker had to pay him two million dollars. Even though that the banker gave the other men a chance to regret his decision, he did not. At first we can see that banker was completely sure that the other man could not stay longer than three or four years as he said “To me two millions is a trifle, but you are losing three or four years of the...

... middle of paper ...

...ngs in life than getting the better of a boundary dispute.”(Saki 1) This makes the reader understand that he regretted all of those wasted years of fighting.

In contrast of the two stories, in “The Bet” the banker did regret betting the two million dollars, but in the end he only tries to do something about it for his own benefit. He was going to commit murder just to avoid paying the money, while in “The Interlopers”, both of the characters regretted the fighting between families, they did talk about forget about the problem, and start being friends.

Eventually, both stories have similar endings where most of the characters regret an action that changed their life. As a result of bad choices, they end up in the wrong paths. We are building our future every day by the choices we make, but some of them might lead us to events that can change us in a good or bad way.