The Man to Send Rain Clouds

The story of “A Rose For Emily” is written by William Faulkner. The story is about a child, Miss Emily Grierson had been cut off from most social contact and all courtship by her father. When he dies, she refuses to acknowledge his death for three days. After the townspeople intervene and bury her father, Emily is further isolated by a mysterious illness, possibly a mental breakdown. Emily, she is a burden and entirely cut off from the outside world. Faulkner uses the literary terms such as setting,symbolism, and characterization to reveal the loneliness from the old traditional society.

The setting in “A Rose for Emily” is Faulkner’s post-civil war Jefferson, a small town in the deep south of the united state with a description of the Grierson house in Jefferson.

In this South town, which is defeated by the North, every thing including people’s concept and the sense of value is replaced by the new concepts from the North. In this setting, due to this old traditional ideas, some people are imprisoned in the past and ignore the passage of the time. Therefore, the main character, which is called Emily, is one of them. The entire story is set in Emily’s house, and her house is very old but grand. Accourting to Faulkner descried Emily’s house, “it smelled of dust and disuse-a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of the one windows, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their things, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray”(517). In this sentences, the house perfectly mirrors Emily’s isolation from the outside world. From the inside decoration of the house, everything is covered with dust and the air is humid. Faulkne...

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...minance"(Gwin 31). Emily has no chose about what goes on in her life because everything has to order by her father. The consequence, Emily has no freedom, lovers, friends and lives with full loneliness in her entire life.

Faulkner uses literary terms in “A Rose For Emily” to reveal the old tradition system leading Emily having a lifetime of loneliness. She is totally a tragedy of the old traditions. Even so, she could have a better life after her father’s death; however, she does not get out of the old traditional system her father built for her. Through lonely life and death brings to Emily that it is showing the spirit of southerners failure. Also, it exposes the harm of the old tradition and old ideas. In this story, it implies us that we should abandon the old tradition in order to get a better life. However, we should avoid Emily’s tragedy happening to us.