Professor Thornburg
English 1302 Monday-Thursday 1:00-3:30pm
July 2, 2013 A Rose for Emily William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” is his first short story published in a national magazine. It is a tragedy about a motherless woman denies her father’s death. She used to be nobility before her father’s death. But after her father’s death only thing left for her is a big old house; no money, no friends only herself. She was afraid of any change and refused to growth up. The story carries a theme about the extremes of isolation by physical and emotional. Faulkner used the story to show us how human beings become isolated by their community, by their families, by tradition, by the past, and by the choice and actions they made. Faulkner’s used pretty rich setting to give out a very good background; he also used many symbol and narrator’s point of view to better describe the meaningful of the story.
“In an effective short story, setting may figure as more than mere background or underpinning, it can make things happen, it can prompt characters to act, bring them to realizations, or cause them to reveal their inmost natures”, Kennedy suggest (107). The story was told about a creepy old house in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi during 1861-1933. Faulkner wrote many detail about the setting to makes the story look more reality and vivid. In the opening of the story, the author begins by the Emily’s funeral and goes back to the past to tell the