Similarities Between A Rose For Emily And Ralph Ellison

William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” and Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal,” from his novel which selected as a short story in literary anthologies, are both set in the South in the early to mid-twentieth century. The characters, circumstances, and narrative voices are all quite different, but both shared the Southern setting and the theme of racial relations in the South.
Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” mentions a town legend named Miss Emily Grierson whose family was once important, rich, and powerful in the Mississippi community in which the story is set. The narrative voice is the voice of the town itself, a gossipy mindset that gets all of its information from outside perception, rumor, and town history. The narrator does not actually know Emily that they are not friends and probably not even familiar. However, because of the Griersons’ name, the town pays attention to Emily’s life from the time she is a young woman until her death, which is declared at the beginning of the story.
Emily is a faithful traditionalist, likely because she loving remembers the time when her family name meant something in the town. Now, her house is infirm, and as it turns out, she’s keeping a dead body on a bed in her house. Emily tries to hold on to old opportunity granted to her family in more wealthiest times. Meanwhile, the town around her develop and changes. Falkner presents Emily as a symbol of a dying culture, namely the medieval South. Before the Civil War, the South was