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A Rose For Emily Time Capsule Analysis

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No Magic Man in Box is Coming to Save You from the Future I hate change, anyone who knows me well can tell you that. How I wish I had some sort of time-capsule in which I could place my version of the world; shut out anyone who wanted to change it. But actually acting upon these impulses is highly dangerous. In “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, Miss Emily Grierson is planted firmly in the past, a lone dead pine amid the ashes of a once great forest. Like such a tree, Miss Emily stunts the growth of the new, shading seedlings who need the sun to thrive. Miss Emily’s story serves to caution those who find themselves hiding from change, and a reminder that bystanders are not innocent. Miss Emily’s home is like a time-capsule, and she, a …show more content…

Respectively, they represent the past and the future. The narrator explains that after her father’s death Miss Emily “was sick for a long time. When [they] saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl” (132). This description gives the impression that Miss Emily was reverting back to her childhood, unable to move forward, and it makes a strong contrast with the next section of the story in which we meet Homer Barron. He was a foreman who came with the construction company to pave the town sidewalks. A paved sidewalk is something new for the town, and sidewalks themselves are used to get to one place from another. But Miss Emily does not move on, and so she is unlike the sidewalks. Homer was “a Yankee -- a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face” (133), and being from the North he came to Miss Emily presenting change. She would not have it, just like “when the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it” (134). Homer could not change Miss Emily, and Miss Emily could not change him, as it is heavily suggested that he is gay, a more progressive lifestyle for the time. When she could not keep him, Miss Emily killed him, in order to preserve her fragile illusion of a time long

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