The Theme Of Isolation In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

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A town. A funeral. A dead body in an alive woman's home. These brief topics in "A Rose For Emily" by William Faulkner make the story such an absorbing one. Throughout the story, the audience gets to see how much time the townspeople spend on gossiping about an elderly lady who keeps to herself. By revealing parts of the story through first-person plural point of view, William Faulkner demonstrates the theme that isolation can turn a person into a monster. Initially, The reader experiences a time where the townspeople are whispering about Ms. Emily's father running off all of her boyfriends. According to William Faulkner, "We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will." Basically, Faulkner is mentioning how her father is the main factor to how she turns into a monster due to how he ran away all of her boyfriends. At this point, Ms. Emily is alone and isolated since she can't be with anyone due to the actions that her father makes. Clearly, the author wishes to start from the beginning of Ms. Emily's life to show how her father caused …show more content…

One of the only notable features in the book is when the townspeople observed a head on the second pillow in Ms. Emily's bed: "Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair." This demonstrates how a dead body has been living with Ms. Emily for a very long time. Clearly, the author wishes to show how insane Ms. Emily is for laying next to a dead body for a long time. In this instance, the author expresses how much of a strange person Ms. Emily is for living with a dead

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