A Rose For Emily Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Title: Faulkner's A Rose for Emily.
Subject(s): BOOKS; ROSE for Emily, A (Short story)
Author(s): Wallace, James M.
Source: Explicator, Winter92, Vol. 50 Issue 2, p105, 3p
Abstract: Asserts that Faulkner's `A Rose for Emily' is about, among other things gossip, and how through the narrator, we implicate ourselves and reveal our own phobias and fascinations. Narrator's comments vitally important; Approach reading by ignoring all temptations to discuss Oedipal complexes, sexual preferences, and scandal; Best to refuse discussion of characters except for the narrator.
AN: 9208101832
ISSN: 0014-4940
Persistent link to this record: http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9208101832&db=aph
Database: Academic Search Premier
* * *
FAULKNER'S …show more content…
But if he is an alderman, how does he know so precisely what took place in the druggist's shop or in Judge Stevens's office? The narrator may be any one of these people, but he cannot be all of them. He knows so much (if indeed he hasn't fabricated everything) because the details of Emily Grierson's life have been passed to him along a sloppy bucket-brigade of gossip, making him all the more unreliable and all the more suspect as he passes along to us the observations and suspicions of his fellow townspeople. Homer's visit occurred forty years before the narrator writes. Surely memory and imagination have helped to embellish the stories swept forward by curiosity and "affection." Because everything this narrator says is suspect, we are denied the luxury of knowing that Homer Barron is or was anything.
In fact, if Homer is gay and if the narrator knows it, why does he (the narrator) bother to hint around rather than simply come out with it? He cannot say because he does not know and because he wants the reader to join "us"--"our whole town," "the rising generation," with its garages and its paved roads and its noses in everyone else's business. At the moment that he chooses to hint at Homer's sexual preference, the narrator is so intoxicated with gossip and so comfortable under the protection of consensus that he begins to
Subject(s): BOOKS; ROSE for Emily, A (Short story)
Author(s): Wallace, James M.
Source: Explicator, Winter92, Vol. 50 Issue 2, p105, 3p
Abstract: Asserts that Faulkner's `A Rose for Emily' is about, among other things gossip, and how through the narrator, we implicate ourselves and reveal our own phobias and fascinations. Narrator's comments vitally important; Approach reading by ignoring all temptations to discuss Oedipal complexes, sexual preferences, and scandal; Best to refuse discussion of characters except for the narrator.
AN: 9208101832
ISSN: 0014-4940
Persistent link to this record: http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9208101832&db=aph
Database: Academic Search Premier
* * *
FAULKNER'S …show more content…
But if he is an alderman, how does he know so precisely what took place in the druggist's shop or in Judge Stevens's office? The narrator may be any one of these people, but he cannot be all of them. He knows so much (if indeed he hasn't fabricated everything) because the details of Emily Grierson's life have been passed to him along a sloppy bucket-brigade of gossip, making him all the more unreliable and all the more suspect as he passes along to us the observations and suspicions of his fellow townspeople. Homer's visit occurred forty years before the narrator writes. Surely memory and imagination have helped to embellish the stories swept forward by curiosity and "affection." Because everything this narrator says is suspect, we are denied the luxury of knowing that Homer Barron is or was anything.
In fact, if Homer is gay and if the narrator knows it, why does he (the narrator) bother to hint around rather than simply come out with it? He cannot say because he does not know and because he wants the reader to join "us"--"our whole town," "the rising generation," with its garages and its paved roads and its noses in everyone else's business. At the moment that he chooses to hint at Homer's sexual preference, the narrator is so intoxicated with gossip and so comfortable under the protection of consensus that he begins to