Examples Of Foreshadowing In A Rose For Emily

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Literary Analysis:
“A Rose for Emily”

Foreshadowing is a key tactic used by an author to reel the reader in. This method makes the reader try to predict the ending, and they must read to the end in order to find out if their educated guess was right or not. William Faulkner utilizes foreshadowing in his short story, “A Rose for Emily” all throughout.
Emily was presented as a gothic character in this story, and this helps make the ending that is revealed more believable. She was all too comfortable with death living in her house for an extended period of time, so much so that her father’s corpse laid in her house for three days after he had died. “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face” (Johnson …show more content…

Emily wanted the best poison there was for a specific purpose. “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up” (Johnson & Arp 561). Emily would not give the reason of why she was purchasing the poison as the druggist had requested. Homer Barron and Miss Emily were apparently in love and married, according to the eyes of the town. However, shortly after this was noticed, Homer disappeared. He then reappeared at Emily’s door, and then was never seen again afterwards. “And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron” (Johnson & Arp 562). The reader can guess that since Homer was last seen at Miss Emily’s house, that she probably had something to do with his disappearance. The purchasing of the arsenic also goes right along with this, even though the telling of the events were on separate pages. The reader just has to put the two