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Essay / Narrative value in A Rose for Emily - 1314
In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner tells the complex story of a woman beaten by time and unable to move forward in life after the loss of each important male figure. in his life. Unlike Disney stories, there is no Prince Charming to save the fallen princess, and her supposed misery becomes the talk of everyone in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. As the townspeople talk about her and construct various scenarios to explain 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; it uses a narrator to convey the details of a tale in the first person, looking at the timeline, role of the narrator, and interpretations of "A Rose for Emily", one can see that this story is impossible to tell without a narrator. As Faulkner begins "A Rose for Emily" with Emily's death, he immediately and intentionally obscures the timeline of the short story to create a level of distance between the reader and the story and to capture the reader's attention. Typically, the reader builds a relationship with each character in the story because they go on a journey with the character. In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner “weaves together the events of Emily’s life”; no particular order disrupts the reader's journey (Burg, Boyle, and Lang 378). Instead, Faulkner creates an obligatory alternative route for the reader. It “sends the reader on a dizzying journey by referring to specific moments that have no central referent, and thus weaves the past into the present, the present into the past. “Since the reader is denied this connection with the characters, the na...... middle of paper ......Works Cited1. Burg, Jennifer, Anne Boyle and Sheau-Dong Lang. "Using constraint logic programming to analyze the timeline in A Rose of Emily". Computer and Human Sciences (2000): 377-3922. Faulkner, William “A Rose for Emily”. Schilb, John and John Clifford “Making Literature Matters: An Anthropology for Readers and Writers,” Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin, 2009. 667-6753. Perry, Manakhelm “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings [With an Analysis of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”] Poetics Today (1979). 35-65+311-3654. Skinner, John “A Rose for Emily: Against Interpretation.” “Journal of Narrative Technique” (1985): 42-515. Sullivan, Ruth “The Narrator in A Rose for Emily.” Journal of Narrative Technique (1971): 159-1786. Watkins, Floyd C. “The Structure of a Rose for Emily.” Modern Language Notes (1954): 508-510