Change In Williams Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

-“Miss Emily Grierson died, the whole town went to her funeral,” (Faulkner I). -“. . .But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily 's house was left,” (Faulkner I).

In the story, There Will Come Soft Rains and in A Rose for Emily the author uses symbolism to show social downfall. The author’s purpose for writing There Will Come Soft Rains was to show how society is being destroyed and how we are the cause of that. In the story A Rose for Emily the author's purpose was to show how you have to love yourself before you can understand how to love others also how damaging it can be if you do not know how to love yourself because you will just be relying on that one person for what they made you believe happiness and love was. In the story, There Will Come Soft Rains symbolism is shown through the house to vividly convey the theme of social downfall.

In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, the accumulation of dust in Miss Emily’s house reinforces her static and perverse character. The townspeople describe Emily’s house as full of “dust and shadows” (105), “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps – an eyesore among eyesores” (98) for generations after generations. The house’s poor, dust-filled condition symbolizes its owner’s unflinching denial to new changes. Furthermore, the loss of her father drives Emily to act on her tenacious impulse to forestall time. Emily stubbornly holds onto her father’s body for three days, repeatedly claiming that “[he] was not dead” (101).

Homer’s poem The Odyssey is about a warrior who has not been home from the Trojan War in twenty years. He is held from home by Poseidon by several monsters and other challenges. When he returns home, he finds that his house has been overtaken by suitors trying to marry his wife. The Odyssey has many examples of figurative language in the text.

“A Rose for Emily” is a dark, suspenseful Gothic tale in which a young girl is put on a pedestal by a town who sees her as haughty and scornful. Miss Emily Grierson’s father controls her and her love life, pushing away all people until he dies and Emily is left alone. As her life goes on the townspeople watch her and judge Emily, almost turning her life into a spectacle to be talked about. At her death, a gruesome sight is unfolded when her lover of over forty years ago is found decomposed in her upstairs room. William Faulkner effectively builds epic suspense in “A Rose for Emily” by the unchronological order of the story, the treatment of Emily’s father towards her, and her family’s history of mental illness.

”(Faulkner, Section 4). This occurrence of events, foreshadows the murder of Homer, by Emily.   Through the effective use of numerous rhetorical strategies including tone, characterization, and foreshadowing Faulkner successfully conveys the tone of Emily’s isolation and resistance to change.  These strategies helped in further strengthening the theme and making it more clear to the

Faulkner’s use of the strand of gray hair and the indentation of a head in a pillow symbolizes aging and time gone by and the fact that Emily may have been sleeping next to Homer’s dead corpse for several

Paloma Cerda Mrs. Koehler ENGL-1301-566 September 20, 2017 In A Rose for Emily written by William Faulkner, the story of Miss Emily is told through a very loose format. Through this narration, there is a long and drawn out suspense built up through little hints left by the reader without fully giving away the dark truth behind Emily and her house. Until the end of the story, the narrators ambiguity cleverly points the reader towards the climax of the story where Emily is discovered to be Homer Barron’s killer. This ambiguous element is important to the quality of this short story as it drives it forward and keeps the reader interested.

“A Rose for Emily” is a unique short story that keeps the reader guessing even though its first sentence already reveals the majority of the content. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is the epitome of a work that follows an unconventional plot structure and a non-linear timeline, but this method of organization is intentional, as it creates suspense throughout the story. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” follows an unusual plot structure, which creates an eccentric application of suspense to a short story. Throughout the story, there are no clear indications of standard plot structure in each section, such as intro, climax, and denouement. Instead, there are sections, which are not in chronological order, that describe a particular conflict or event, which in turn creates suspense, as each conflict builds upon each other to make the reader question the overall context and organization of the story.

In the short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “The Story of an Hour,” the authors use literary devices to create vibrant female characters. These literary devices include diction, imagery, language, and sentence structure. “The Story of an Hour,” written by Kate Chopin, opens with a woman, Louise Mallard, who has a heart disease, and her friends must gently break the news to her that her husband has passed away in a railroad accident. She mourns briefly, but then realizes that she can now live for herself, instead of just as someone’s wife. Shockingly, she walks downstairs after fleeing from her friends’ horrible news, and her husband walks in the door.

‘A Rose For Emily’ confirmed to the conventions of Southern Gothic literature to disclose the deep-rooted values of South following the end of slavery. William Faulkner’s writing fits to this style of the genre. He is trying to show how the story takes place that disclosed an ambivalent condition of reinventing the southern society after the civil war. Throughout the story, William Faulkner followed the convention of using decayed scenes/images to reveal the falling apart of Southern Society.

In William Faulkner’s, “A Rose for Emily,” the historical context is important to understand. In order to fully comprehend the short story there must be some sort of understanding about the time period in which the story took place. This short story took place in the 18th/19th century during and after the Civil War in the South. In “A Rose for Emily” the historical context shows the social, economic, and the cultural environment of the background. Miss Emily was born during the Civil War.

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” critiques the American South Describing Emily’s vibrant life full of hope and buoyancy, later shrouded into the profound mystery, Faulkner emphasizes her denial to accept the concept of death. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” takes place in the South during the transitional time period from the racial discrimination to the core political change of racial equality. Starting from the description of her death, “A Rose for Emily” tells the story about the lady who is the last in her generation (Emily Grierson). Being strong, proud and a traditional lady of southern aristocracy, Emily turns into an evil, unpredictable and mysterious old lady after the death of her father. Even though “A Rose for Emily”

A rose for Emily is a symbolic short story about love and death that depicts Emily’s life and the life of the old South. Murder, necrophilia and gradual decay of the old south are used in the story to symbolize Emily’s life, to be similar to that of the South after it was defeated in the civil war. She loved the dead, and her life became desperate, her love for Homer made her murder him ending up sleeping with his corpse for years just so she would not lose him. She was not happy; the same way a plantation life withers dies and becomes a memory, she faded from real life, even though she was still living physically, everything that mattered in her life had passed away. The way Emily 's father stands in the doorway is described as "Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.”

One of William Faulkner’s best short story of all time is “A Rose for Emily.” The story is a suspense and horror, that will leave readers in shock. Additionally, the story is in chronological order and cleverly broken down into five parts. The first part of the story is the current event that shows Emily’s funeral and the town people mourning. The other four part are pieces of puzzle that shows flash backs of Emily Grierson on how the everyone in town viewed her.