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A Rose For Emily Literary Analysis Essay

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A Rose For Emily Literary Analysis Essay
“A Rose for Emily” Literary Analysis

The story “A Rose for Emily” is a piece that is short in length, but one that is filled with many important aspects of writing. The characters in the story are all different and very important to the telling of the piece throughout. We get to know many of the outsiders looking in, but never really get to know the main character until the very end when her dark secrets are revealed through the drawn out plot. The story revolves around the curiosity about one woman who has always been tight lipped and introverted and the town’s desire to find out what she truly is hiding in the closed up, musty house that she has resided in all her life. The reader is able to get the story from a first person plural
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After years of her being ostracized by the town, and years of secretive behavior, she died alone. “And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up…..she died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.” The imagery that is created by this excerpt is disturbing for many reasons. The visual of Emily dying alone in a dusty dark house was the very epitome of how her life had been lived in this town. She was viewed as odd and abnormal, all attempts to aide in her conforming were eventually thrown by the wayside as she resisted. The town didn’t know about Emily in her life, and this except confirms that they didn’t even know about her in death. The book as whole depicts a town full of people who are involved in each other’s lives and who come together in unity to pick apart one sorrowful woman’s desire to just be left alone. Her actions are never good enough, her decisions are continually challenged, and she is forever left a loner to both age and waste away to nothing in a big lonely house, having been nothing but a bother for the town her entire

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