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A Rose For Emily Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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Well-known author, William Faulkner, in A Rose For Emily, recounts the life of a woman named Emily. Faulkner uses various rhetorical strategies to convey his dark and dreary theme regarding Emily. These strategies include tone, characterization, and foreshadowing. Faulkner’s effective use of these strategies dramatically intensify the reader’s understanding of his theme regarding Emily’s isolation and resistance to change. Faulkner uses characterization to exhibit Emily’s isolation and resistance to change. It is apparent throughout the story she develops an attachment to those around her. For example, Faulkner shows the readers how she could not accept the reality of her father’s death. This is supported through this statement in the passage …show more content…

This quote highlights Emily’s isolation from society, restricting herself to inside of her home. Later on in the story, Emily goes to a pharmacy attempting to purchase poison, in which her reasoning is unidentified. She had just been engaged to a man named Homer. We can see in the story how she requests the strongest poison they have, “I want the best you have. I don't care what kind.”(Faulkner, Section 3). Also, acknowledging that we have prior knowledge of her past lover leaving her, she now has motive for wanting to kill Homer. Building on to this, the passage also tells us that shortly after the purchase of the poison, Homer suddenly disappeared. “And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron.”(Faulkner, Section 4). This occurrence of events, foreshadows the murder of Homer, by Emily. Through the effective use of numerous rhetorical strategies including tone, characterization, and foreshadowing Faulkner successfully conveys the tone of Emily’s isolation and resistance to change. These strategies helped in further strengthening the theme and making it more clear to the

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Homer’s body was kept in that upstairs room for over fifty years. After losing her father, Emily did not want to lose the only other male figured she had in her life. Emily thought the only way of keeping him with her for the rest of her life was by death and keeping his

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Miss Emily comes from an old wealthy line of family in the deep south. Faulkner story is highly symbolic, enhancing miss Emily’s values and character. “Miss Emily is described as a fallen monument to the chivalric American South”(Allmon). Faulkner uses the setting of the story to show the emotional state of Emily. The female-male relationship between Emily and her father is strict, oppressive, and controlling; Their relationship has a major impact on Emily’s character Throughout the short story.

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World War I occurs in the 1914 to the 1918. In this period of time lots of things happened. Countries and cities were fighting each other to prove who’s the stronger and forceful city/country. In the world war I period of time, lots of conflict happened, starting from the misunderstanding problem that leads to a big war between alliances, or alliances just wanted to prove which side is more forceful than others. Each alliances made lots of plan on how to attack each other.

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The narrator explains to the reader, “So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheartthe one we believed would marry herhad deserted her” (226). The decaying smell permeating Miss Emily’s property for a couple weeks is Faulkner’s first use of foreshadowing as the narrator lead us closer to Homer Barron’s death. When Homer Barron enters the town for construction work, him and Miss Emily spent many of their hours together and as the narrator explains, “…for almost six months she did not appear on the streets” (229). When Faulkner writes of Miss Emily purchasing a man’s silver toilet set engraved with the initials H.B. and a complete outfit, including a nightshirt, of men’s clothing, the reader assumes she is bringing them home for Homer Barron.

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Not only that, as Homer becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, it scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station. Even though Emily is from the high class family, it does not mean that she is living up to the pleasant lifestyle. As a matter of fact, she is actually living a gloomy and desolate life, which is essentially the opposite lifestyle expected for Emily's rank in society by the townspeople. Although Emily once represented a great southern tradition centering on the landed gentry with their vast holdings and considerable resources, Emily's legacy has devolved, making her more a duty and an obligation than a romanticized vestige of a dying order.

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After reading A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, many people initially wonder why Miss Emily would murder Homer Barron. When reviewing the events of the story, it becomes apparent that she displayed symptoms, manifestations of her mental state in her behavior, of being socially inept and thus capable of this heinous crime. These symptoms are unsurprising, as her father represses her, withholding her from the public. Emily accordingly displays symptoms of this repression by evading authorities and the townspeople. Faulkner is trying to get the reader to go back and review this problem-the cause of Homer’s murder- by identifying the signs that this crime occurred and Emily’s symptoms of mental instability.

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By using unconventional plot structure, Faulkner has created a complex method of storytelling to explore the moral shortcomings of Southern values and ethics during the American Civil War through the means of Emily, a character who is socially and mentally trapped in the old

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Telling the story in an irregular order, Faulkner develops a sense of suspense by adding details to the mysterious Miss Emily. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care: a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (451). The reader learns that Miss Emily had been seen as an eccentric woman that the people of the town had to take care of and overlook, ultimately overlooking her as a suspect in Homer Barron’s disappearance. Miss Emily often disappears into her house for months and years at a time,

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Faulkner’s use of the strand of gray hair and the indentation of a head in a pillow symbolizes aging and time gone by and the fact that Emily may have been sleeping next to Homer’s dead corpse for several

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In his short story, “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner intends to convey a message to his audience about the unwillingness in human nature to accept change and more specifically the secretive tendencies of aristocrats in the South during the early 20th century. In order to do this, Faulkner sets up a story in which he isolates and old aristocratic woman, Miss Emily, from her fellow townspeople and proceeds to juxtapose her lifestyle with theirs. In doing this he demonstrates her stubborn refusal to change along with the town, but also Among several literary devices the author employs to achieve this contrast, Faulkner sets up his narrator as a seemingly reliable, impartial and knowledgeable member of the community in which Miss Emily lives by using a first person plural, partially omniscient point of view. The narrator is present for all of the scenes that take place in the story, but does not play any role in the events, and speaks for the town as a whole. Faulkner immediately sets up his narrator as a member of the community in the first line of the story, saying that when Miss Emily died “our whole town went to her funeral.”

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Faulkner says, Emily buys Arsenic from the druggist and the next day Homer is seen entering her home and that was the last time anyone ever saw him or Emily for some time. No one but the negro servant left the house. (Faulkner 455) Emily kills Homer because she doesn’t want him to leave her. If he’s dead, he can’t run

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The value of romance and mortality resembles the theme of obsession, and is shown throughout the plots, and the characters in, “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “The Birth Mark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Firstly, Faulkner illustrates obsession of romance through mortality. In addition, Emily’s obsessive illness of love over death it often seen throughout the plot. Lastly, Hawthorne demonstrates the obsession of mortality thorough romance, through the main protagonist, Aylmer in “The Birth Mark.” To compare, Emily and Aylmer believe their obsessive consequences was from the heart, despite their obsessive disorders.

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Kierrah Edwards ENGL 201 9/20/15 Character Analysis: Emily Grierson The short story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner depicts how seclusion can certainly impact one’s life. Throughout the story, Emily gives off this “insane” impression. However, after fully reading the story, the reader can fully understand why Emily was the way she was. Emily Grierson was a very dependent person.

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No one ever sees Homer come back out of the house and everyone starts to notice an awful smell coming from inside. Since it was in a generation when the law wasn’t so strict no one really looked into the situation. When Emily died people finally were let into her house for the funeral. They found Homer lying in the bed decayed. Everyone then realizes that was the awful smell coming from house.

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Meeting Homer Barron was her biggest change from her old self, because her father did not allow her be in any relationships, but she went out in public with Homer “driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable” (454). Consequently, this was only because she was living in her own reality and believed that Homer would be the one to marry her. Homer was “not a marrying man” (454) and would not marry Emily, but she refused to accept the denial of marriage from him, so she killed him to keep him with her forever. She stayed within her house to keep herself in the Old South. When she told the men to see Colonel Sartoris, she was not aware that “Colonel Sartoris had been dead for almost ten years” (452) at that point.

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