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William Faulkner 's A Rose For Emily

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Love, Loss and Longing—three traits that many would agree Emily Grierson, the main character from William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily”, experiences inexorably. At first glance, one might be confident in one’s understanding of the story at face-value, claiming it to be a thrilling mystery with a mysterious ending. Another may try to analyze contextual evidence to answer some of the many unanswered questions this story proposes. Why does Emily sleep with the corpse of her late husband? Why does she kill him in the first place? Yet, I will not attempt to do so, at least not directly. I will instead turn to the perspective from which this story is told: that of the townspeople. The ways which they describe Emily will lead to tangential yet important realizations that they share more with the outlandish characters they describe than they realize, illuminating basic human tendencies that we all share along the way. In Part I of the story, Emily is introduced in detail that, at first glance, one may insignificant to the plot yet somewhat telling of Emily’s condition. After careful reflection on the words used, however, one could draw a very different conclusion: “[Emily] entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head” (1). Emily is, in part, a manifestation of the negative effects that inevitably accompany wealth. First, she is described as wearing all “black”

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