Richard Yates 'Short Story The Best Of Everything'

Richard Yates "The best of everything"
In the short story "the best of everything" Gracie's coworkers give her gifts and take her out to eat the Friday before her wedding. Her spouse Ralph got a bonus from his boss and calls Grace to set up a date for later that evening, but feels upset because his male friends do not pay any attention to the wedding or anything that is going on the week before. With the wedding coming up so fast, Grace is still indecisive about the choice of her husband Ralph because her roommate Martha points out all of Ralphs flaws. Grace and Ralph both come from working class families, except Ralph has a low-status job, his friends also have low status jobs. Ralphs interest are very common for a male, such as sports. His speaking Is very poor, for the way he pronounces words like, toilet, he pronounces it "terlet". …show more content…
I choose these two because contradictory stands for mutually opposed and preferably stands for if possible. These two words have a lot to do with this short story and it leads to Grace and Martha. The contradictory comes between their attitudes and they are two completely different attitudes. Martha is going against Grace marrying Ralph because she doesn’t like how Ralph is and he has a low status job, and doesn’t think he is the right fit for Grace. Grace is all in for Ralph because they are about to get married and she is his fiance, Grace is very hesitant because she is afraid that Martha will think bad about her and not highly of her. The preferably is mainly on Martha because she prefers that Grace should reschedule the wedding just in case Grace changes her mind about Ralph after all. Grace prefers that she would marry Ralph. I think that the contradictory Is more important than preferably because the contradictory has two different meaningful sides to it and it shows which character has the better attitude towards something meaningful than the