Similarities Between A Rose For Emily And The Great Gatsby

William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald are both successful internationally recognized authors most noted for their works A Rose for Emily and The Great Gatsby respectably. Unparalled authors, both use their works to express the themes of love, death, and scandal to depict tragedy and social downfall. Through the use many literary elements, Faulkner and Fitzgerald both express a theme of isolation as a result of the inability to let go of past loves. In William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby both main characters Emily and Jay Gatsby switch roles from being lively romantics to the obsessive former lover. Jay Gatsby an American made millionaire from humble beginnings spends the better half of his adult life

Upon the passing of her father and the sudden mysterious disappearance of her short-term lover Homer Barron, it took her three days to accept her father’s passing, such that when the ladies of the neighborhood came to comfort her, she informed them that her father “was not dead.” (Faulkner 630) Because of her denial of her father’s death, Miss Emily rarely became seen by those other than her servant. The townspeople describe her seclusion as “...she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.” (Faulkner 310) In article Uncovering the Past: The Role of Dust Imagery in A Rose for Emily written by Aubrey Binder, she highlights these effects “When Emily’s father dies, the physical presence of his influence dies with him, but the effects of his actions remain to wreak havoc on Emily’s future.” (6) With nearly thirty years passing and an amounting unpaid tax bill, the newest generation of towns people did not favor Emily’s peculiar arrangement with the former mayor. In addition to her mounting tax bill, neighbors began complaining of the odor exuding from Miss Emily’s estate. In order to protect her reputation, men of authority repeatedly went in the night to sprinkle

Upon Miss Emily’s purchase of the poison, it shows her steep transition into obsession of the past. To the public eye it was incredibly out of character in which they believed she was preparing to kill herself after not being able to marry Homer Barron. However, when she fails to prove them right, the disappearance of Homer did not take the public by surprise until the sudden self-seclusion of Miss Emily herself. “Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets.” (Faulkner 314) It is because of her self-inflicted isolation that Miss Emily dies all alone in a diminished and dilapidated home where “the house is an essence of her crypt, enclosing in its walls all the signs of death, dust, shadows, foul odors, not to mention a corpse that rots into a skeleton.” (Harris 174) Miss Emily’s death signifies her self-inflicted solitude, and her complete and final result of internal and external