Analysis Of A Rose For Emily, By William Faulkner

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William Faulkner’s Southern background plays a constituent part of the creation of his story “A Rose for Emily”. With his creative mind Faulkner created a county in Mississippi called Yoknapatawpha. Like the southern town he was born and raised in, Faulkner peopled this story with both African American and Caucasian people of the late 1800’s. Faulkner’s idea of writing this story was to focus on the events causing destruction and suffering in one’s inner and outer situations. Many of Faulkner’s people and a lot of his families that he makes known in his writing appear in many other of his writings. “Some of Faulkner’s major fictional families include the Sartoris, Snopes, Dee Spain, Compson, Sutpen, McCaslin, and Carothers families” (William Faulkner). All the way through Faulkner’s lists of favorite books and stories, these people are present. “ One of the strangest, strongest, and most memorable characters in Faulkner’s short fiction is the homicidal dowager, Emily Grierson, in “A Rose for Emily.” Generations of Faulkner devotees are familiar with the tale of the reclusive spinster who, by means of murder and necrophilia, wages a battle to the death with time and change in the town of Jefferson” ( The Widow of Windsor… Emily Grierson). They describe the many extending generations. Miss Emily, The Board of Alderman, The African American Servant, and Colonel Sartoris are all representations of the Antebellum South in “A Rose for Emily”. Homer Barron, and the townspeople were representations of the Modern South and the Greirson Family is the representation of the old South. “Faulkner’s structural problem in “A Rose for Emily” demanded that he treat all of miss Emily’s life and her increasing withdrawal from the community and... ... middle of paper ... ... important events contains the death of Mr. Grierson; Emily’s father in her younger days and the connection with a northerner Homer Barron. This story summarizes the most important South changes following the Civil War. Faulkner description of the Griersons’ rotting house corresponds with Emily’s emotional and physical rotting and too makes her mental decline clear to the reader of what is going to be the turning out of the story. Miss Emily is characterized by her effort to separate herself away from her community. "After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all" (395). The broken connection with Homer Barron and the ending of her father’s life lead her to wanting to stay away from the town people. The organization of Faulkner’s story and the description of Emily gave the story a real life meaning.

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