A Rose For Emily Modernism

What makes modernism catch the eye of a reader? Well, within modernism, there are several crucial characteristics. The short story, “A Rose for Emily” is characterized as a modernist piece of literature. Although the story contains the majority of the requirements, there are three that really stick out. In “A Rose for Emily” the author conveys modernism through the diction by using imagery, by having unfinished thoughts due to fragmentation of the story, and lastly, by having an ironic ending.

Within this short story, the author uses diction in the imagery to convey modernism throughout the story. Modernism uses imagery to convey the story to the readers so that the reader can receive a better understanding of the story. Through imagery, the

In this story, the ending was extremely ironic because the reader is thinking of one ending, but the actual ending ends up being totally different, and a complete surprise. At the end of the story, it was surprising for the reader to read, “She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped up on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight” (826), because one was not expecting her death. Also in this quote the author describes her hair as being gray, just as he did later on when the narrator found an “iron-gray hair” (827) upon the pillow next to the murdered man. That was an unexpected event that was extremely ironic. At this point, the author is insinuating that Emily had to do with the death of Homer Barron. The description of the room added onto the ironicness of the story because it was said to be, “decked and furnished as for a bridal”(826), but the people felt “A thin, and acrid pall” (826). This is ironic because the narrator was just saying how it was all nicely looking as if for a bride, but then it switched to a gloomy and bitter covering or atmosphere. When the narrator found Homer Barron, he said, “The man himself lay in the bed” (827). At this point in the story, the narrator confirmed Homer’s death. This is shocking to the reader because of how ironic it was. When the author wrote that line, instead of using descriptive diction, he just said it bluntly. Faulkner just went right down to the point, which added to the ironciness of the story. By using diction, the author conveyed the ironic ending, which was one more characteristic of modernism that this story