A Rose For Emily And Cathedral Analysis

Conformity is a change in behavior, which is normally caused by another person or a group of people’s thoughts or opinions of someone. When an individual is constantly told that they are a certain way, the individual will eventually begin to believe it and conform to other’s views without even realizing it. This happened to the young Emily Grierson, by a numerous amount of people, and continued to happen until the day of her death. Many can probably say that it was the main reason for her deteriorating mental condition, instability, and the strange approach of how she handled death. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner is an unusual story about a girl with a troubled mind who is eventually pushed over the edge by the constant gossip of the townspeople and the heartbreak of a lover.

In Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” written in 1983, the author points out that empathy and perspective are the only way to truly experience profound emotion.The narrator is struggling is sucked into his own comfort zone, he drowns his dissatisfaction on life, marriage, and job in alcohol. A man of limited awareness breaks through his limitations by socializing with a blind man. Despite Roberts physical limitations, he is the one who saved narrator from himself and helped him to find the ones vies of the world.

In his short story, “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner intends to convey a message to his audience about the unwillingness in human nature to accept change and more specifically the secretive tendencies of aristocrats in the South during the early 20th century. In order to do this, Faulkner sets up a story in which he isolates and old aristocratic woman, Miss Emily, from her fellow townspeople and proceeds to juxtapose her lifestyle with theirs. In doing this he demonstrates her stubborn refusal to change along with the town, but also Among several literary devices the author employs to achieve this contrast, Faulkner sets up his narrator as a seemingly reliable, impartial and knowledgeable member of the community in which Miss Emily lives by using a first person plural, partially omniscient point of view. The narrator is present for all of the scenes that take place in the story, but does not play any role in the events, and speaks for the town as a whole.

In William Faulkner’s short story, A Rose for Emily, Emily Grierson, a prominent member of her small town, dies alone in her home. Upon her death, curious townsfolk entered her home trying to learn her secrets. It was thought she was crazy. Emily Grierson was not crazy; she was isolated by her father, which led to her odd social tendencies and unique interactions with others. A Rose for Emily is a short story based in a small town. The narrator focuses a lot on Emily Grierson after her death. The narrator said multiple times they believed she wasn’t crazy. However, their actions proved to show the opposite.

Raymond Carver is said to be one the most influential American writers and poets in the 20th century, especially in his works of short stories. One of his most famous pieces is “Cathedral.” This well-known short story is the final piece in Carver’s collection Cathedral published in 1983. Carver includes much symbolism through the story’s plot, structure, point of view, tone, and character build. The depictions of each character’s experiences, the irony in the story, and hearing the narrator’s point of view in “Cathedral” work in harmony to support its themes that prejudice and ignorance as well as the nature of reality are present and change throughout the course of the story, and all lead to a strong character development by the close.

Jesus is famous for being a messiah in a time that did not welcome him; he was an outsider and one who was perceived to be a threat to the society of his time. Robert is also on the fringe of society on account of his blindness. In the opening sentence of “Cathedral”, the narrator identifies Robert as “this blind man” as opposed to the various other labels he could heap upon him (Carver 514). The narrator also propagates the idea that “the blind move slowly and never laugh”, an illogical stereotype. This is not dissimilar to Jesus’s discriminatory treatment at the hands of the Romans as he conceptualized Christianity and spread his message to the people.

He does not hide the fact that he despises Robert to his wife or to the reader. Also, the narrator straight up explains that he is jealous of Robert and his wife’s relationship. Another positive trait that he possesses is his loyalty to his loyalty and love to his wife. Earlier it was mentions that the narrators adore his wife and does not want someone to take away his sweetheart. The narrator eventually realizes that Robert is not out to steal his wife and he opens to him. Later in the story, Robert and the narrator are both watching a documentary on Cathedrals. Robert then asks the narrator to describe the physical features of the Cathedral, but the narrator has a tough time describing it. Eventually, the narrator tries to draw a cathedral with his eyes closed. While drawing, the narrator has an epiphany and learns how to see someone or something beyond their physical attributes. According to enotes.com, the cathedral in the story symbolizes how life is more than a day to day event that takes up one’s time and how one could find something rare and beautiful inside their

There are two types of loners in a society, a person that fears interactions and the person that likes solidarity. These two types of introverts are completely different from one another however; they are both outcasts in society. Some individuals enjoy the feeling of being alone and having a private life; while others wish to be social yet don’t know how to approach social situations without being stricken with fear. In “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner is about Emily the protagonist, who craves power and control over others, however she is a loner because she willingly avoids to interaction with the rest of the town. On the contrary to “Soldiers home” by Ernest Hemingway who’s about Krebs a Soldier whom has just returned home after serving

The narrator in “ Cathedral” has the characteristics of a white sheltered man, who lives in the beginning of the 80’s. He is the reflection of Archie Bunker, from the hit show, All in the Family. The narrator lives in the sub-burbs of Connecticut, where his ignorance, is able to blossom. Where his way of thinking is universal. The narrator has a lot of biases views of people, especially of the blind. He begins to announce his biases, when he speaks of his wife’s friend, Robert who is blind.The narrator also exhibits ignorance and biases when analyzing Robert’s marriage and dead wife. By meeting Robert, the narrator begins to open his eyes and realizes that blind people can see better than people with 20/20 vision. In “Cathedral”,

Tillie Olsen uses doubling in “I Stand Here Ironing” to symbolize the fear that the narrator expresses for her eldest daughter Emily. The narrator fears that her life is being reflected in her daughter. She does not want her daughter to grow up the way she did. They are at odds with each other throughout the story. Emily needs help and her mother is not in the right place to give her that help. The use of doubles in this story reflects the lives of Emily and the narrator to show how similar they actually are.

The value of romance and mortality resembles the theme of obsession, and is shown throughout the plots, and the characters in, “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “The Birth Mark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Firstly, Faulkner illustrates obsession of romance through mortality. In addition, Emily’s obsessive illness of love over death it often seen throughout the plot. Lastly, Hawthorne demonstrates the obsession of mortality thorough romance, through the main protagonist, Aylmer in “The Birth Mark.” To compare, Emily and Aylmer believe their obsessive consequences was from the heart, despite their obsessive disorders.

According to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories (1615), Faulkner’s story, “Rose for Emily” Miss Emily’s characteristics can be explored from the psychological point. As Freud state that, “human behavior unconscious force of the id and super-ego active within every individual” (1616); nevertheless, Miss Emily was very attached to her father when she grows up and the closeness with her father make her to fail her sexual-fulfillment. Emily’s attachment to her father, and the impact of the father figure on Emily’s life affected her psychosexual development. However, the characteristics such as id, ego and super-ego, plays a major role in Emily’s life.

Setting is the time, mood and place in which a story is set. The details in which an author adds to a story describing the background hold a lot of accountability for which direction the story will eventually go. In the short reading ‘A Rose for Emily’, the author, William Faulkner, uses setting to give the reader more understanding and depth into the alienated life and times of a woman named Emily Grierson.

In the story “A Rose for Emily”, the author William Faulkner tells about a mysterious small, fat woman Emily Grierson. After her father past away and her sweetheart is gone, Emily has a mental breakdown and is entirely cut off from the outside world; people hardly see her at all. The whole town is very curious to see the inside of her house, to penetrate Emily’s world and exchange a few words with the Negro who is her cook and gardener.

The story is not easy to read and even harder to understand due to the many time jumps. The narrative perspective is also unfamiliar: Faulkner uses an anonymous first-person narrator, who never appears in the first person singular, but only as "we" occurs. One could therefore even speak of a we-perspective. The fact that Faulkner does not tell the story in a traditional order can be seen from the fact that he begins, so to speak, with the end of the story: the death of Emily. Starting from the end, the narrator keeps making different flashbacks and leaps in time. It almost seems as if he time jumps, every time he remembers a new (old) detail/part of the story. An example for this is how he jumps from the city’s attempt to get Emily to pay taxes, yet suddenly we find ourselves reading about an episode thirty years prior: the city leaders are trying to fight off the smell of decay around Emily’s house. These jumps make it somewhat difficult (yet also exciting) for the reader to reassemble the event in our minds.