A Rose For Emily Literary Analysis

In his many works of fiction, William Faulkner explores the lives of characters who live in the closed society of the American South, a society rooted in traditional values. In the short stories "Barn Burning" and "A Rose for Emily," Faulkner explores what happens when individuals lose their connection to this society and its values. Both Abner Snopes, a rebellious sharecropper, and Emily Grierson, an unmarried woman from a prominent family, are isolated from their respective communities, and both find themselves in a kind of societal limbo. Once in that limbo, they no longer feel the need to adhere to the values of their society and, as a result,are free to violate both traditional and moral rules.

Initially, Emily 's isolation is not her
His method of destruction comes in the primitive form of fire, which he uses not to kill but simply to threaten. In the two barnburnings of the story, Abner incites confrontations and then uses the burnings as a way of getting even for imagined offenses. In one incident, for example, Mr. Harris, a landowner, finds that Abner 's hog ate a section of his corn crop. When Harris demands a dollar pound fee for the return of the hog, Abner sends him a threatening message, "Wood and hay kin burn" (Faulkner,"Barn" 161). Despite Harris 's efforts to resolve their dispute, Abner is determined to carry out his threat. Ultimately, the barn burnings further alienate Abner from the society whose laws he is defying. Like Abner Snopes, Emily makes her own rules and develops her own twisted conceptsof justice and revenge. Although she is not directly punished by the community for her crime, Emily suffers terribly. She may possess the body of Homer Barron, but his death renders her incapable of holding onto him as a person and a husband. The result of her gradual estrangement from society, involuntary at first, but eventually confirmed by her willing violent act, is complete isolation from the real world and withdrawal into an empty world of her