1. What are the causes of Matilda Loisel’s suffering? 2. Why does the author refer to Matilda’s birth as a

1. What are the causes of Matilda Loisel’s suffering?
2. Why does the author refer to Matilda’s birth as a «twist of fate»? How did poverty bring such suffering to Matilda?
3. What is the conflict between the external, real world and the inner desires of the heroine?
4. Does the author condemn her for dreaming of luxury and wealth? Can she be considered guilty of such an attitude towards life? Did Matilda envy Madame Forestier?
5. What ideals does the bourgeois world instill in a person?
6. What cause-and-effect relationships can be observed between Matilda’s life events and her state of being? What artistic method is characteristic of establishing such connections?
7. Why didn’t Matilda feel joy about the invitation to the ball?
8. What words and expressions reveal the nature of her emotions in the dialogue with her husband?
9. What is the internal conflict in this dialogue?
10. Prove that Matilda’s husband loved her, even though he didn’t fully understand her soul.
11. Is there a subtext in the dialogue between Matilda and her husband about the new dress?
12. Why didn’t Matilda want to attach live flowers to the dress?
13. How did she feel during the jewelry fitting?
14. How does the author convey the dynamics of the heroine’s emotional state before, during, and after her visit to her friend?
15. What words and expressions more precisely represent the main conflict of the novella?
16. Why does the description of the ball, for which the heroine prepared so diligently, take up only two paragraphs in the novella?
17. What was Matilda like at the ball? Is the author right in saying that «she was as unhappy as a woman created for a different environment»?
18. What meaning does the mention of people’s living conditions acquire in the novella? Why didn’t the modest life of the clerk oppress Matilda’s husband as it did her?
19. What did Matilda and her husband feel after the ball, and explain the dynamics of their emotions and inner state? How does the author depict the characters’ emotional state?
20. Was there another way out for Matilda and her husband regarding the lost necklace?
21. What artistic significance is there in the fact that the story of 10 years of the Loisel family’s life takes up less than a page?
22. Did Matilda change externally or internally in the situation of extreme poverty?
23. How do you understand the philosophical meaning of the final words of the fragment: «How strange and changeable everything is in life! How little is needed to perish…»
24. Why did Matilda decide to tell her friend about the loss of the necklace? Is Matilda justified in blaming her friend for her «hard days»?
25. What are the subtleties of the subtext in their dialogue? Is Matilda saying what she thinks? Has her attitude toward her friend changed compared to the beginning of the novella?
26. What changed in Matilda’s character over 10 years of poverty?
27. What meaning does the motif of money acquire in the novella, and how does its dynamics change throughout the text?
28. What price did Matilda and her husband pay for the lost necklace? Can their losses be measured only in material terms?
29. According to the author, who is to blame for the life of the Loisel family?
30. Can it be argued that the author’s social and moral observations in the novella condemn the injustice of the bourgeois world?