Money Today; A comparative essay between "Paper" by Catherine Lim and "The Winner" by Barbara Kimenye

Essay by sketchytwinkieHigh School, 12th grade April 2002

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Money today seems to be the most important thing in people's lives, examples of this are shown in "Paper" by Catherine Lim; which tells the story of Tay Soon and his wife, and their general obsession with owning their own dream house. Another story that helps to prove this point is "The Winner" by Barbara Kimenye which center's itself around an elderly gentleman named Pius who is forced to deal with the acquisition of a large sum of money. While the two stories contain characters, which hold different values they both hold a similar ironic ending, and both stories prove that money changes people's lives.

Although both stories help to prove that money indeed does change people's lives; both "Paper" and "The Winner" do it through characters that hold completely different values. For example in "Paper" Tay Soon is obsessed with his money. Even after he had made enough to buy his dream house he refused to sell his stocks because he wanted more.

Whereas in "The Winner" Pius doesn't really care when he is informed that the original amount he had won had to be split between 300 people. Tay Soon was also very vocal about the actions of his mother and how it appalled him when she refused to try the stock market.

"I was kind enough to offer to help her make money.

But since she's so nasty and ungrateful, we'll leave

her alone." Pg 77

This proves that Tay Soon is a take charge kind of guy. This is further proved by his actions, as he buys and sells all his stocks himself and waits in the broker's office for the latest stock tips. However Pius who similarly is discontent at first with Cousin Sarah passively says nothing to her about it and keeps his...