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Comparing A Rose For Emily And The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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The Differences of Third Person POV Many short stories written nowadays are written nowadays in third person to ensure that the audience receives a well-rounded, factual story. The third person POV, however, is extremely broad and can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways by various authors. An astonishing example of the third person variety is a comparison between A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. While Faulkner’s piece demonstrates a mysterious third person POV, O’Brien’s piece takes the third person POV onto an uncommon emotional journey. A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is undoubtedly a third person POV piece, however, it takes on its own tone to portray to the audience. A Rose for Emily does not pull on emotional heartstrings as much as it pulls on a shock factor. Throughout the entire short story, the reader follows the tale of Miss Emily Grierson, a mysterious and withheld young woman. The narrator shares the public’s judgement of Miss Grierson, along with slipping his own judgment occasionally. Although …show more content…

Third person POV often cannot paint a picturesque idyll. As Paul Kurucz writes in his journal article Third Person Writing, “research and third person writing can be emotionally numbing”. This can be seen with A Rose for Emily and The Things They Carried. Both stories involve a character death, yet introduce it very differently. How do they differ? While A Rose for Emily mentions to the reader that Miss Emily has passed within the first sentence to create an impervious reaction, The Things They Carried introduces you to Ted Lavender and allows the reader to build an emotional connection with Lavender before a character death occurs, resulting in an emotional pull from the reader. The Things They Carried invokes the emotional pull with its in depth POV, which gives the POV an entirely different tone from A Rose for Emily despite being the same

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