A Rose For Emily Literary Analysis

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A Rose for Emily" was the first of his stories to be published in a national magazine and the first one even translated into French. But it was also the first story in which Faulkner wrote about his immediate surroundings. Faulkner, who grew up in the city of Oxford, Mississippi, renamed his home in Jefferson and placed almost all of his novels and short stories here with his neighbors, in modified form, as protagonists. "A Rose for Emily" comes from his most prolific creative period and belongs with his appearance in 1930 in the literary era of modernity (Faulkner had presented a year earlier with his novel "The Sound and the Fury" one of the three most important novels of this era). The story of Emily Grierson has been discussed several times …show more content…

As the city's streets are being paved, a Union Army man comes to Jefferson - the foreman Homer Barron. Although quite popular due to his vociferous cursing, the people are skeptical of the affair he begins with Miss Emily and eventually even begin to interfere in their lives. After Homer's sudden disappearance Miss Emily does not leave her house anymore. When, after their funeral, they open their bedroom, which for more than 40 years no one has seen from the inside, the body of Homer can be found there with Emily's …show more content…

Faulkner, however, does not content himself with a chronological list of events from the death of Miss Emily's father to her own funeral. Through his innumerable jumps between the individual events in the past, he completely dissolves the time-construct. Frank A. Littler speaks of associative storytelling in "The Tangled Thread of Time: Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'" and describes it as follows: "one memory brings up another and different incidents of the past are brought to the foreground of the story . "(82). A chronology is therefore less meaningful than just that associative narrative, since it is ultimately of lesser importance when something happened. Much more important is the fact that it happened and in what context it matters. However, the passage of time is so fragmented that Gene M. Moore in 1992 found eight different views on the chronology of history [2]. On the one hand this confuses, but on the other hand it makes Miss Emily's story and her whole person seem

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