A Description of Moral Value in William Sydney Porter’s Short Story The Gift of The Magi

Abstract

This paper discusses types of moral and tries to find out which one is very dominant in William Sydney Porter’s short story The Gift of the Magi. There are seven types of moral which are represented through the main character and the text of the story. Love and compassion are very dominant compared to other types such as affection, devotion, help, kinship, and dishonesty, and unwise. The theory applied in describing these phenomena is moral theory or ethics. Besides, the method applied in doing the research is qualitative. It is said so because the writer of this paper only describes the data taken from the text of the short story such as word, phrase and sentence. All the data are selected and categorized in order to be described before taking the conclusion. Thus, it is found that moral is standard of behavior that determines man’s conduct to understand the goodness of life.