Essay On Narration In A Rose For Emily And The Lottery

While reading William Faulkner's, "A Rose For Emily", and Emily Jackson's, "The Lottery", you notice indistinguishable patterns between the two stories. Faulkner and Jackson both write their stories -withholding vital information- that ultimately lead up to an atrocious and puzzling conclusion. Their stories have the same objective, which is to create a mysterious, tense setting and then surprise you with a shocking and thrilling ending. They use both foreshadowing and other literary elements to cause suspicious feelings and create tense moments that keep you guessing at what the big shock is going to be. However, their methods of withholding information differ and they have their own unique ways of using literary elements to create a grisly outcome.

In Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily", the narrator is an unnamed towns' spokesperson, whom tells the story of Miss Emily using the town's opinions of her, and not actual facts. By using this narration Faulkner only telling the townspeople's side of the story, leading to confusion because readers do not get the full story from Miss Emily's point of view. Jackson does the same thing in "The Lottery", using third person objective which involves a narrator that Rather than telling us the characters' thoughts or feelings, the narrator simply shows the process of the lottery unfurling. Jackson uses this type of narration, to give us no beforehand knowledge of the lottery, leaving readers unsure about what winning the lottery actually means. Both author's choice of narration work in withholding vital information that readers could have used to guess what the ending would have been before they read it. Even so, the narration of the story is only one fundamental part in how the writers withheld information from the