Conflicts On Short Stories: “The Quartet” and “The Snob”

8 Pages 2040 Words

Essay on Conflicts in two short stories: “The Quartet” and “The Snob”

The statuses of wealth, power, and prestige are the components of social space mutually ordering and ranking people. Emotion, communication and conflict are the reasons. These three things are present in all human interactions and impact each person differently. Everyone manages emotion, communication and conflict from habit – patterns and styles developed early in life. Relative status ranks, status disequilibrium, and incongruence have consequences for conflict and social interaction among individuals. The basic struggle in “The Snob” and “The Quartet” is material status, those who have and those who want to have. It is the right and the wrong side of the rail tracks and that is an ancient conflict on a stage of life. Alice in “ The Quartet” and John jr. in “The Snob” are similar characters. They both mentally abuse their close ones. John uses Grace to verbalize his lack of social status and finds an excuse not to be proud of his family, his father and the way he dresses. In his mind his family is not worthy to meet Grace’s wealthy family. Alice in “The Quartet” plays a childish attempt to display deniable sexual feelings with her old friend. She insinuates her husband’s sexual ability, but she declines and radicalizes his intelligence. She insults him, although they are living together under the same roof. Protagonists in these stories chose suffering and pleasures over the truth, and forgot about the reality, because they couldn’t face who they truly are.

John in “The Snob” is a typical teen believing that the grass is greener on the other side, forgetting that people are only interested on who you are. Success in life is what you have to live with. The status of your family doesn’t make you a better person and believing that wealth can buy everything is the biggest mistake that human being can make. Many cannot buy ...