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The Office Short Story

1345 Words6 Pages

Good writers, who write masterpieces, wisely use “the elements of the short story” to engage readers. Character, setting, plot, conflict, theme, and other elements are practically used to create climax, bring up questions, form suspense or mystery, and make the story captivating. “The Office” by Alice Munro and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner are epitomes of greatly written short stories due to perfect usage of “the elements of the short story.” Both authors use setting, character, and point of view to show the women’s jealousy and anger towards men due to social constraints and beliefs. Setting is the key element in these short stories because two authors deal with the same problem in the similar era. “The Office” is written in 1968 …show more content…

When the story is written in a first-person plural point of view, it provides a wide range of viewing the situation but cannot get detailed thoughts or feeling of the characters. We know how townspeople talk about Miss Emily and also Miss Emily’s situation like social belief. For instance, Homer and Miss Emily had a difficult time because townspeople say Homer is not the right guy for Miss Emily. The class difference was important around 1930s for marriage. However, we cannot figure out what each character is thinking other than from the dialogue. Townspeople talk about their feelings about Miss Emily; therefore readers can get a grasp of Miss Emily and her family’s reputation, but we don’t know what Miss Emily is thinking about others and society’s ideal of marriage. Emotion is less observed in first-person plural point of view …show more content…

The unnamed narrator from “the Office” and Emily from “a Rose for Emily” react differently to the same problem. Both characters suffer from the social belief and people around them, trying to take control over their lives. For instance, “Emily’s life is shaped by her father’s absolute control over her; her murder of Homer Barron is reaction, not action” (Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism). This quote shows Miss Emily’s insanity, resulting in murder, is caused from social expectation and suppression from townspeople and her dad. On the contrary, the narrator of “the Office” reacted to her limitation due to her gender by getting her own office outside of the house. Additionally, another problem pops up between the narrator and Mr. Malley when Mr. Malley accuses the narrator for the lipstick in the washroom. She is furious of Mr. Malley and says, “I really wanted to murder him” (Munro). However, she does not kill him and just leaves the office. These two characters both react to the problems but in different ways. One ends up killing someone without expressing anger but the other just leaves without killing anyone but expresses her anger. These different reactions of characters end the stories in different

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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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The Elements of A Good Story What makes a good story? Oftentimes writers encounter questions like this and start to wonder about the writing essentials of a good story. As many skills and beautiful words that make up a captivating story, it will have to be one that makes connections to the readers. Only when readers are able to make a connection to their experience or values, they start gaining from the story. Through creating conflicts, conveying the theme and a relative background, the writers of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Sonny’s Blues” fully express their values and thoughts by the “bridge” between readers and them.

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Since Emily is so off from the world, this makes the understanding of what she is dealing with even harder. If she was more outspoken with the people of the town, rumors would have not grown about her, and caused even more

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Both Emily and Robert are prematurely judged by the narrators in both stories, and the assumptions are so far fetched from the reality. Miss. Emily is perceived to be a lonely old woman, whom nobody ever spoke with. Since they never talk with her or learn anything about what is going on in her life, the townspeople begin to gossip to make up for this. They knew her father had driven away any man from becoming close to her, and they just thought to themselves, “ poor Emily” (32).

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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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In the short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “The Story of an Hour,” the authors use literary devices to create vibrant female characters. These literary devices include diction, imagery, language, and sentence structure. “The Story of an Hour,” written by Kate Chopin, opens with a woman, Louise Mallard, who has a heart disease, and her friends must gently break the news to her that her husband has passed away in a railroad accident. She mourns briefly, but then realizes that she can now live for herself, instead of just as someone’s wife. Shockingly, she walks downstairs after fleeing from her friends’ horrible news, and her husband walks in the door.

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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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“A Rose for Emily” is a unique short story that keeps the reader guessing even though its first sentence already reveals the majority of the content. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is the epitome of a work that follows an unconventional plot structure and a non-linear timeline, but this method of organization is intentional, as it creates suspense throughout the story. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” follows an unusual plot structure, which creates an eccentric application of suspense to a short story. Throughout the story, there are no clear indications of standard plot structure in each section, such as intro, climax, and denouement. Instead, there are sections, which are not in chronological order, that describe a particular conflict or event, which in turn creates suspense, as each conflict builds upon each other to make the reader question the overall context and organization of the story.

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849 Words | 4 Pages

Three of the most important aspects of any story are the point of view, characterization and plot. In the short stories “Geraldine Moore the Poet,” “The Story-Teller,” and “Enemy Territory” this statement proves to be true. With a good analysis, all of these things can be found in the stories. Additionally, the point of view, characterization and plot can relate to the theme. The point of view needs to be scrutinized throughout the whole story.

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1009 Words | 5 Pages

To compare, Faulkner shares a slice of evidence as to why Emily has an uncontrollable obsession for the dead, “After her father 's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.” (Faulkner) Given these points, her father becomes arrogant and isolates her from society, or anyone who is willing to take Miss Emily from him. When her father, the only man in the world who has loved her,

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806 Words | 4 Pages

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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1141 Words | 5 Pages

A literary analysis on who is the narrator: The Narrator in A Rose for Emily is First Person Plural There is a mystery that seems to be unsolved throughout the years. Many important and influential literature critics have tried to discover who is the narrator in A Rose for Emily. After an extensive period of research, the mystery of who the narrator is has been solved. There are different points of view and information collected by the main narrator.

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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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584 Words | 3 Pages

Emily is judged for loving a man who is less fortunate than her . In the following line the townspeople’s reactions to their relationship is obvious, “’Poor Emily’, the whispering began. ‘Do you suppose it’s really so?’ they said to one another” (102). The townspeople did not to much care for the relationship between the two because of the barriers set up by social class saying poor date the poor and rich date the rich.

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875 Words | 4 Pages

The study attempts to check the style of William Faulkner in his story A Rose for Emily. The story is talking about the tragic life of the character Miss Emily Grierson and presenting her personal conflict which is rooted in her southern identity (Meyer,1996: 56). This paper is going to adopt an integrated approach of language and literature in its analysis. Thus, the present study is going to adopt the stylistic model of short (1996) for the purposes of linguistic analysis. The focus of the study is to show and analyze the following themes: given vs. new information, definite and indefinite articles, deixis, value-laden expressions and endophoric vs. exophoric references.

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