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Horror In 'A Rose For Emily And The Lottery'

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Everyone has been to the movies to watch a horror film, and anyone who has been through eighth grade english; has read a horror story. Some horror that is shown in short stories can be shown through murder, or the actions that the characters make. Three stories that were discussed in English 161 showed horror through the plot. Throughout the stories “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “The Lottery;” horror is developed very openly, and is shown through vivid details. In the short story “A Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe shows horror through the main character. First, in paragraph eleven, the main character screams, “The old man’s hour has come!” This shows that the main character was going to end the Old Man’s life. Not only does the main character decide when the Old Man’s life is to end, but he also smiles at the scene of the …show more content…

She kills Homer because she knows that he has never really loves her. He uses her for her company, and when she has the epiphany, she takes action. In her mind, killing Homer will prevent him from leaving her to go see someone else. Yes, this plan will work, but does she think of the consequences? Just like the previous short story, this story continues to get better. Whenever the people came to Miss Emily’s house, what they find petrifies them-- they find Homer lying dead in the bed. The people in the house describe Homer as hard to tell the difference between the bed and what was left of his body (paragraph 58). The most horrific part of the whole story is when the people notice “that in the second pillow was the indention of a head,” (paragraph 59). This shows that Miss Emily has been sleeping with the dead body. Both of the passages are great examples of how horror can be conveyed through short stories. Not only are those good examples, but so is the short story, “The

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The townspeople overlooked her insanity because they believed she was only grieving. After this, she mostly hid in her house only coming out occasionally until Homer Barron and his crew of laborers came into town to build sidewalks. Homer and Emily began seeing each other even though people said she was too good for him

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“A single strand of long gray hair”. After Homer Barron was murdered by Emily Grierson. The stories 1*“A Rose for Emily” and 2*“The Landlady” two stories about lustful women killing men. “The Landlady” is a story about an elderly lady who poisons men to keep their bodies. “A Rose for Emily” where a woman poisons the man she loves so that he won’t leave her.

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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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As soon as Emily felt as if Homer didn’t feel the same because he hasn’t proposed to her she jumps into an unpredictable state of mind. Emily poisons Homer because she refuses to let him abandon her. Miss Brill I basically living a lie. She tries to avoid the fact that she is isolated. Miss Brill involves herself in many other lives that she is around, but she doesn’t converse with anyone.

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806 Words | 4 Pages

“We remembered all the young men her father had driven away” (453). Miss Emily’s father drove away young men interested in her, not allowing her to have a love life and therefore a life outside of him. This controlling treatment of Miss Emily by Mr. Grierson coincides with Emily’s fight to control her love life with Homer. “Because Homer himself had remarked - he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club - that he was not a marrying man” (454). If it weren’t for the fact that Miss Emily murdered Homer, he would have left her, therefore she used the murder as a way to keep him close to

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960 Words | 4 Pages

In Love and In Death William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily”, centers around a reclusive woman named Emily Grierson who is the protagonist of this story. Emily lives in Jefferson, Mississippi with her strict and over protective father who turns away any male suitor who shows any interest in her as he believes them to be unfit for his daughter. Emily and her father are regarded as upper-class southerners who live in a very nice home. The townspeople see Emily as a mysterious individual, often pitting her.

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1334 Words | 6 Pages

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe is an enthralling and terrifying tale of an insane and paranoid Narrator suffocating his own roommate in his sleep. Throughout the story, fear and dread is a common theme. At every twist and turn Poe creates a sense of uneasiness. Using this, Edgar Allen creates fear and dread through the Characters, Conflict, and Suspense, making the “The Tell-Tale Heart” a scary, and captivating story. Edgar Allen Poe creates fear and dread in “The Tell-Tale Heart” through his characters, more specifically the Narrator.

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862 Words | 4 Pages

In this short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, the authors represent the sense of horror in their stories. They are very similar in expressing their terrifying point of view. However, there are also differences. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is told in the first person perspective which creates compulsory picture of a mad murdered, whereas the third person perspective of “A Rose for Emily” shows Miss Emily through the eyes of others, which changes the narrative radically. In Addition, Miss Emily committed the crime because the fear of being alone.

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1395 Words | 6 Pages

In Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of criminal insanity, the first-person narrators confess unsound confessions. They control the narrative, which only allows us to see through their eyes. However, they do describe their own pathological or psychological actions so conscientiously that they exhibit their own insanity. They are usually incapable of stepping back from their narratives to detect their own madness. The narrator 's’ fluency is meticulous and often opulent.

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When her father died we can see that she is controlling of him and would not release the body for burial. After she loses her father, it is as if she loses her sense of reality. It is as if maybe the old white house is beginning to represent the attitude and ways of Emily. The house is old, dark, and very dusty just as the townspeople think Emily is. Homer Barron is a construction worker from New York.

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987 Words | 4 Pages

However, Homer decided he could not marry Emily because of his feelings for other men. Since he did not have those kind of feeling for Emily, he decides to desert her. With her father’s death and leaving her, Emily is pushed her over the edge. Homer was the love of her life the person she wanted to be with for the rest of her life. She thought they had a really good connection with one another.

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1214 Words | 5 Pages

This story looks like a horror one because the main character becomes monstrous, a woman who kills her lover and lives with his corpse for forty years. Why would Homer Barron – “a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face” - be interested in Emily if he is supposed to be gay? The narrator states that he is homosexual: “he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club” . Is this the reason why Emily killed him? Did she feel betrayed?

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1425 Words | 6 Pages

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.

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434 Words | 2 Pages

While Edgar Allan Poe as the narrator of the The Tell-Tale Heart has the reader believe that he was indeed sane, his thoughts and actions throughout the story would prove otherwise. As the short story unfolds, we see the narrator as a man divided between his love for the old man and his obsession with the old man’s eye. The eye repeatedly becomes the narrator’s pretext for his actions, and while his delusional state caused him much aggravation, he also revealed signs of a conscience. In the first paragraph of the short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe establishes an important tone that carries throughout his whole story, which is ironic.

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925 Words | 4 Pages

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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