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We Have Always Lived In The Castle Essay

Decent Essays

William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily also displays the same fold-in-on-itself mystery that We Have Always Lived in the Castle calls forth. In both stories, past time is brought to the reader’s attention, both through flashbacks, as found in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and through a narrative present reporter that gives information on a past story-arc, where he or she is well aware of the ending, i.e. the present. The two stories also both hold an element of mystery for crimes that are only implied, but never actually expressly stated by the person committing them. For much of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the reader does not know that it is Merricat who poisoned the sugar bowl. It is not until the house has already been halfway …show more content…

John B. McElmore, in Brian Reed’s S-Town has an inverse relation with clock, building them rather than destroying them, as compared to Merricat from Shirley Jackson’s story. The contrast appears that John is focused on things of the past and trying to fix them, while being altogether unconscious of how him living in his own time and space affects the future. He remains static and dwelling on past times, much like Merricat does. Instead of having a belief that he is capable of changing the situation of poverty and folly in Bibb County, he chooses instead to write pages upon pages of everything that is wrong within the place he lives. He also obsesses over clocks, sundials, and astrolabes, all of which he creates with extreme precision, as if he can somehow fix something in his town through this very precision. He gifts time-consuming, detail-oriented clocks, made with such precision that they are aligned to the coordinates of, for example, his friend Tom Moore’s house. He also uses the timepieces as a means to interact with the other portions of his world, especially with other men in his life whom he views as personal

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