A Rose for Emily
The short story “A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner describes the life of woman filled with loneliness and fanatic love. The plot depicts the protagonist in the surrounding after the death of her father. Emily refuses to accept this fact, but after a while manages to recover and create relationships with Homer Barron. Nevertheless, when she understands that chances of marriage are too miserable, Emily buys arsenic, poisons her fiance and live with the corpse till the end of her life in the room frozen in time. The essay will discuss various types of tropes in the story and explain surrealism, irony, imagery, symbolism and alienation examples used by the author.
First of all, surrealistic atmosphere can be described
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Another important trope in the story is symbols. There are plenty of them including the old house as a representation of stable and permanent Emily 's lifestyle, pocket watch that indicates the time Emily lives in and the moment of wedding that is stopped, untouched wedding suits covered with dust as a symbol of unresolved love, a strand of gray hair on the pillow as a sign of eternal feelings, etc. Moreover, such powerful symbols of the story as lime and arsenic used to kill the person and then stop the smell from corpse 's decomposing are allegory for people 's attitude towards problems. Instead of investigating the source of smell and face the issue, they tend to get rid of the consequences that bother them and remain not touched by the complication. Such behavior can be also viewed as a sort of alienation, when people try to ignore the individual who refused to socialize with them. In addition, Emily also undergoes alienation by limiting her communication and living separately in the detached house “which no one save an old man-servant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years” (Faulkner 95).
To conclude, a short story by William Faulkner presents a variety of tropes to the reader including surrealistic atmosphere of casual reality and necrophilian love with a dead corpse and ironic attitude of people towards the personality of Emily and her relationships with Homer