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Emily Bierce's A Rose For Emily

Decent Essays

According to Melczarek, Faulkner uses more complicated narrative strategy to achieve psychologically complex effect of horror in his story, while Bierce uses hallucination in his story to create suspense. Bierce’s starts his story with a man who is about to be hanged to death without any description of that men. In the second section of the story Bierce describes a men named Peyton Farquahar, the person to be hanged on old creek bridge. Farquahar appears to make a dramatic escape when the rope breaks from the bridge, but at the end readers come to know that Farquahar was just dreaming about the escape. Similarly, “A Rose for Emily” starts with the funeral of Emily Grierson and a brief description of Emily. In the next section author describes …show more content…

Examining the narrator’s manipulations of the timeline may indicate a motive or motives that, when taken into consideration with the directions in which the narrative steers reader attention when horror results from the text’s final image. Nebecker rightly questions earlier interpretations of the narrator as singular and male, suggesting a more plausible first-person collective and multi-generational narrator. Furthermore, narrator’s strategy for presenting Miss Emily Grierson’s story when Homer Barron mysteriously disappears and his remains are found after Emily dies years later on a bed which Emily appears to have slept in as well in upstairs room of Emily’s house, Nebeker concludes that “by abetting if not aiding these acts, the narrative “we,” representative of the Old South, triumphs over the later “they,” representative of the New South.” A closer look at Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Old Creek Bridge” reveals a number of ambiguous passages that sound normal in the flow of narrative about Farquhar’s escape, but can also depict the actual horrors of dying at the end of a rope. In these ambiguous passages, Bierce’s narrator makes a point about the relativity of time and about how people tend to take for granted the valuable things in life until threatened with their removal. These two themes, the fluid nature of time and the value of things often taken for granted, are clear, and readers usually have no problem seeing

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