A Rose For Emily

Figurative language

Miss Emily's story is certainly bizarre, suspenseful, and mysterious enough to engage the reader's attention fully. She is a grotesque, southern gothic character whose neurotic or psychotic behavior in her relationships with her father, her lover, and her black servant may elicit many Freudian interpretations. For example, her affair with Homer Barron may be seen as a middle-aged woman's belated rebellion against her repressive father and against the town's burdensome expectations. That William Faulkner intended her story to have a much larger dimension is suggested by his choice of an unnamed citizen of Jefferson to tell it. This paper provides an analysis of a paragraph from “A Rose For Emily” on figurative language, sentence structure and rhetorical devices

Rhetorical Devices

The narrator never speaks or writes as an individual, never uses the pronoun “I,” always speaks as “we.” As representative of the townspeople, the narrator feels a compulsion to tell the story of a woman who represents something important to the community. Black voices are excluded from this collective voice as it speaks out of old and new generations. Colonel Sartoris's antebellum generation is succeeded by one with “modern ideas”: “Thus, she passed from generation to generation.”

Diction

"The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years."

ANALYSIS

A description of Emily is made in comparison to the house: "She looked bloated like a body long submerged in motionless water and of that palled hue" (Literature and the Writing Process 316). This paper discusses the main ideas of the passage from "A Rose for Emily" and how these relate to the work as a whole, and then analyse the style to indicate the effects of the stylistic ...