What is the author's purpose in "The Necklace"?

The author’s purpose in the necklace is to persuade readers to be true to themselves.

The author’s purpose is usually to inform, entertain or persuade.  In fiction, the author’s purpose is related to the theme of the story, a mixture of entertaining and persuading.

“The Necklace” is about a vain woman, Mathilde, who borrows a necklace from a friend, Madame Forestier so she can go to a fancy party.  She loses the necklace and they replace it with a similar one from a jeweler. She and her husband spend ten years working to repay their debts, and in that time Mathilde loses the only wealth she had: her beauty.  She meets her friend after ten years, who comments that she looks aged.  She explains about working to repay the necklace, and Madame Forestier tells her the necklace was a fake.

This is a perfect example of irony.  Mathilde, in her vanity, loses the only wealth she has in pursuit of rising above her station.  The fact that she goes broke replacing a fake necklace with a real one is not lost on readers.  The theme of the consequences of not being true to yourself comes out loud and clear.  Irony is very persuasive. 

What is the author's purpose in "The Necklace"?

The purpose of the short story "The Necklace" is to show the danger in the pursuit of material possessions.  Mathilde longs for status in society and is so worried about impressing others that she does not appreciate or enjoy what she actually has.  Because of her selfish desires, she and her husband are forced to spend many years working to play for a borrowed necklace that she lost.  After working ten years to pay off the debt, Mathilde learns the necklace was not real and that all of the years of hard work were wasted.

What inspired the author to write "The Necklace"?

In analyzing the motivation or inspiration for the writing of the short story 'The Necklace' by Guy De Maupassant, it is worth remembering that sometimes, after scrutinzing all the background to a literary work, all we can then do is speculate. However, it is interesting to do just that and line up the biography facts with the short story subject matter to see if we as readers can come up with any possibilities. One idea is that, like Monsieur Loisel, Guy De Maupassant was once a clerk himself in the Ministry of Information (similar to Education.) It's possible that he saw a superficial layer of 'civilized' behavior there that he wanted to lay bare, or uncover for the benefit of society and us - his readers.

What inspired the author to write "The Necklace"?

Unless we can really get on our hands on what might be called 'external evidence" -- evidence such as the early manuscripts and notes, letters, and content of conversations with friends -- we can never really know what an author's intentions are. Two New Critics (Wimsatt and Beardsley) famously make this argument in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy."

New Criticism is not the only way to read literature, but the argument of the "intentional fallacy" is solid. As I see it, based on but not limited to Wimsatt and Beardsley's argument, what we normally have in front of us is the text, not the author; we can talk all day long about what the text does, how it is structured, how it shapes the reader's response in certain ways, and so on. If we read well and closely, we can ground our discussions in evidence drawn from the text. When we move from the text to the author's intentions without also bringing in external evidence, however, we are simply projecting our own views of what the text means onto the author. Even if we can call up the author and ask them, as a friend might, what they had in mind when they wrote a certain story, we are not likely to get the answer that we are looking for. Artists often do not analyze their own writing, do not give fully honest accounts, do not fully understand what was happening during the creative process, and so on.

The author, to return to the language of Wimsatt and Beardsley's argument, is not the "oracle"; we must arrive at the meaning of the text on our own.

What was Maupassant's main purpose for writing "The Necklace"?

Maupassant wanted to use this story to illustrate how a person should be happy with what they have and to show us that we should not allow pride to get in the way of doing what is right. Mathilde saw her life as meager and poor because she was comparing it to the lives of the extremely wealthy. She had a maid, but she wanted more than one and she wanted handsome men to wait on her as well. She had a nice apartment, but she wanted something palatial and covered in expensive tapestries. She has to learn her lessons the hard way when she mistakes the diamond necklace loaned to her for a real one. She loses it and rather than swallow her pride and admit that she lost it, she replaces the fake with a real and goes into severe debt for 10 years. During those ten years her life changes to that of someone who really lives in poverty. Her previous life looks like one of luxury, but she had to lose everything to appreciate what she had in the first place. She finally learns to swallow her pride and tell Mme. Forestier what happened to the necklace so many years ago only to learn that she suffered all these years and it was a fake. 

What was Maupassant's main purpose for writing "The Necklace"?

The author was to show the difference between something real and false, and how our behavior can be affected by our misperception between the two, just as the protagonist's whole life is changed by mistaking false jewels for real. He also wanted to criticize vanity, especially the kind associated with wealth and materialism. To go beyond your means to look pretty, to be excessively concerned about how others perceive you—a perception based on expensive jewelry (in this story) or (in real life) designer jeans or Prada boots, diminishes your own sense of worth, which should be built on character, not what you wear or how you look.