The short story by William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”, is a short tale about a woman named Emily and what is known of her. The question I pose to answer is: Who is our speaker? Who is this “we”? What is the purpose of this “we”? The “we” refers to the townspeople with no apparent ties to Emily’s story. More importantly, the “we” refers to an individual aiming to make this claim. The story’s speaker is but one individual making a claim for some sort of union of individuals. From this stance, it becomes most apparent with what the word “we” entails, and what this “we” does to the point of view. Whichever way you go about it, undeniably there is always an “I” within the “we”. In order to even begin to know who our “we” is, we would need to …show more content…
“When Miss Emily died, our whole town went to her funeral” (Page 516, The Norton Introduction to Literature). Notice that just in the same way that the “we” encloses an “I”, this works the same in the usage of “our”. How does this set up guilt in the story? It is literally phrased “our whole town” to add an emphasis on the state of possession over the area. The phrase wasn’t “her whole town” or “the whole town”. The phrase was “our whole town”. There is a sense of responsibility included in the usage of “our”. When you take possession of something you claim responsibility for it. Using this especially in the situation of a funeral sets up the grounds for the speaker’s guilt. This is important to note when aiming to find out the purpose behind the general usage of “we” in narrating the story. By using “we” as an approach to tell a story about death and implied murder, the individual “I” behind the “we” can relieve themselves from the sense of guilt that accompanies the tale. In order to defend one’s self in the case of a guilty situation, it’s not uncommon for people to claim they weren’t the only person involved in the incident. At least then if they were to be held accountable they wouldn’t be alone in their accountability. Approaching the narration this way shows that the “I” believes that the other townspeople involved feel similarly by speaking in a collective …show more content…
Having someone die in your own town, especially in such the way that Homer Barron is implied to have died, is similar in respect to having someone die in your own house. Your town and your house are both locations you might feel fit the entitlement of “home”. The ability to separate themselves with “we” gives the speaker a chance to escape the idea that they are largely a part of the story themselves. On frequent occasions the “we” is actually actively involved in their own tale. The most important instance of this is at the end of the story. “For a long time we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin” (Page 522, The Norton Introduction to Literature). It is here that we notice just how actively involved in the story the “we” is. The “we” play the important role of both finding Homer Barron’s body and granting us conclusions to Homer Barron’s disappearance. However, the narrator’s usage of “we” actively works to separate themselves from playing a big role in the story. This ties back to the concept of guilt. If the narrator can feel separation from the story itself, then the narrator can feel minimal pangs of guilt in response to their own lack of involvement that resulted in this kind of
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is a work of “sentimental fiction” because it connects all the people living in the small town of Grover’s Corners. In a small town like Grover’s Corners everybody knows each other within the town, so there is a deeper connection of companionship, friendship, and love within the town. The residents of Grover’s Corners constantly take time out of their days to connect with each other, whether through idle chat with the milkman or small talk with a neighbor. So when love and marriage or death happens in the town, it will affect the majority Grover’s Corners residents. The most prominent interpersonal relationship in the play is a romance—the courtship and marriage of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Wilder suggests that
One of the most famous authors in American history is Edgar Allen Poe, thanks to his intricate and unsettling short stories and poems. One of the strongest aspects of Poe’s writing style is the allure and complexity of the narrator of the story. These narrators, ranging from innocent bystanders to psychotic murderers, add depth to such a short story and really allow Poe to explore the themes of death and murder which he seems to have an unhealthy obsession towards. Furthermore, he uses these narrators to give a different perspective in each of his many works and to really unsettle the reader by what is occurring throughout the story. The narrators, whether an innocent witness of death as in "The Fall of the House of Usher" or a twisted murderer as in "The Cask of Amontillado" are used by Poe to discuss the themes of death and murder within these stories and, depending on their point of view, give a different take on such a despicable act such as murder.
I strongly agree with Johnston's statement that Welty has identification to her characters, whether intentional or not. She notes that although she believes Welty identifies with Miss Eckhart in "June Recital", she writes the story for Virgie. Consistently in her stories in The Golden Apples, she writes of sheltered individuals within a close community. Johnston addresses only the identification Welty has to her characters, instead of digging deeper into relational issues. I find it fascinating that in The Golden Apples, Welty paints a picture of Miss Eckhart's life as being ideal, free to follow her own passion and art, which in Miss Eckhart's case was her piano teaching, or in Welty's life, her photography and even her writing. And at the same time, Miss Eckhart has failed relationships and an overall lonely sense about her.
Welty's narrative style emphasizes the reader's role in perceiving and determining the essence of reality through various devices. The comparisons that she offers "have an apparent arbitrariness that challenges the reader to supply an explanation" while simultaneously "lead[ing] the reader away from what is and toward a constantly growing array of alternate realities" (Pei 416). Additionally, through non- sequiturs, unanswered questions, and narrative gaps, Welty positions the audience behind a screen of sorts--from which a character's "subjective state [is] perceptible but nevertheless impenetrable, something we can see (for a moment) but cannot share" (Pei 417). This idea echoes what Pei proposes as a major theme of the collection: "how we achieve communication between the accustome...
“A Rose for Emily” is written in the first person plural, allow the citizens of the town to recount the story. This point of view has been debated by scholars due to its collective language of “we”, which set Emily apart from the town’s citizens. Helen E. Nebeker writes in her literary criticism, “Emily’s Rose of Love: Thematic Implication of Point of View in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”: “The thesis of this paper simply stated, is that forty years of critical study of Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily”, has failed to come to...
Human nature is a conglomerate perception which is the dominant liable expressed in the short story of “A Tell-Tale Heart”. Directly related, Edgar Allan Poe displays the ramifications of guilt and how it can consume oneself, as well as disclosing the nature of human defense mechanisms, all the while continuing on with displaying the labyrinth of passion and fears of humans which make a blind appearance throughout the story. A guilty conscience of one’s self is a pertinent facet of human nature that Edgar Allan Poe continually stresses throughout the story. The emotion that causes a person to choose right from wrong, good over bad is guilt, which consequently is one of the most ethically moral and methodically powerful emotion known to human nature. Throughout the story, Edgar Allan Poe displays the narrator to be rather complacent and pompous, however, the narrator establishes what one could define as apprehension and remorse after committing murder of an innocent man. It is to believe that the narrator will never confess but as his heightened senses blur the lines between real and ...
In “ A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner tells the complex tale of a woman who is battered by time and unable to move through life after the loss of each significant male figure in her life. Unlike Disney Stories, there is no prince charming to rescue fallen princess, and her assumed misery becomes the subject of everyone in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. As the townspeople gossip about her and develop various scenarios to account for her behaviors and the unknown details of her life, Emily Grierson serves as a scapegoat for the lower classes to validate their lives. In telling this story, Faulkner decides to take an unusual approach; he utilizes a narrator to convey the details of a first-person tale, by examining chronology, the role of the narrator and the interpretations of “A Rose for Emily”, it can be seen that this story is impossible to tell without a narrator.
In conclusion, guilt is a strong feeling that not everyone could bear with it. Sometimes, no matter what happens, people still care. Narrator’s character finds it impossible to stop worrying or get over Bartleby, as much as Poe’s William Wilson who finds impossible to ignore the other Wilson. Bartleby and William Wilson are characters that are hard to get rid of them because the power of conscience is stronger than the narrators. Therefore, Melville and Poe, each in their distinctive and expressive way, derive to the same deduction: the reason humans suffer is because they care.
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a short story told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator and opens with the death of Miss Emily Grierson, an elderly woman that the reader quickly learns that the town views more as a character than an actual human being. Through flashbacks, the mysterious and haunting tale of Emily is revealed. As a child, Emily was the member of an aristocratic family, but has now long been living in relative poverty in the former grand home of her family after her father left her with no money. The product of the Civil War South, Emily never moved past the social customs of her youth, and refused to live according to modern standards. This becomes evident when she accepts the mayor’s hidden charity under the guise of her never owing taxes due to a lie that her father had loaned the town money and this was how the town would re...
As a literal deathbed revelation, William Wilson begins the short story by informing the readers about the end of his own personal struggle by introducing and immediately acknowledging his guilt and inevitable death, directly foreshadowing the protagonist’s eventual downward spiral into vice. The exhortative and confession-like nature of the opening piece stems from the liberal use of the first person pronoun “I”, combined with legal and crime related jargon such as, “ crime”, “guilt”, and “victim” found on page 1. Poe infuses this meticulous word choice into the concretization of abstract ideas where the protagonist’s “virtue dropped bodily as a mantle” (Poe 1), leading him to cloak his “nakedness in triple guilt” (Poe 1). In these two examples, not only are virtue and guilt transformed into physical clothing that can be worn by the narrator, but the reader is also introduced to the protagonist’s propensity to externalize the internal, hinting at the inevitable conclusion and revelation that the second William Wilson is not truly a physical being, but the manifestation of something
People has times that they are looking forward to. The times such as childhood, schooling help lead us through our life. While this way of thinking has many positive side, we forget the appreciation of all details of the moments. We see the moments in Thornton Wilder's play “Our Town”. This play takes us to a small town in New England and we see how simple it is, to the point where we may get bored to our lives. After looking through the events in the play we might have see as big and important described as relatively simple and straightforward, we begin to question how important that these events are in our life. Not like Emily realize how much of life was ignored until death. But after death, she can see how much everyone goes through life without noticing the events that are occurring all the time.
In “A Rose For Emily”, by William Faulkner, plot plays an important role in how
The reader sees that the narrator is the ladies of the town on a number of occasions when the words we and I are used in events such as, “People in our town,” (Faulkner 25-2). So when, “Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.” (Faulkner 25-17) is read, one can conclude that the narrator, as well as the people of the town, believe that Emily Grierson never knew the struggle of money as they did. The narrator is also talking about how beautiful Emily was and goes into vivid detail about her looks at old age not being quite as appealing as her younger years. Another example is when the ladies of the town spread word of Homer and Emily, causing Emily’s cousins, also of upper class; to pay a visit and intrude on Emily’s love
Nebeker, Hellen. E. (1970). Emily's Rose of Love: Thematic Implications of Point of View in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily". The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 24(1), 3-13.
The working class can work to create the ‘bread’ but at the end of the day they have no right to it, it goes to the upper classes. By including the reader within the poem using ‘We’ there is more of a unity and solidarity within the text. Its like the reader is part of the march. The poem is written in a song structure so it is easily sung or chanted within a march or a meeting of the