A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
It's safe to say that Miss Emily is mentally ill. She suffers from the delusion that she is not "alone", that she has a boyfriend to snuggle up to each night. In fact, her fragile state of mind tricks her into believing that the actual corpse decomposing on her bed is in fact alive and real, laying beside her breathing as she does. The story is presented in fragments of a whole, dispersed with no chronological structure. The audience gains knowledge of Miss Emily's background as the pages turn, and one crucial occurrence that led to Emily's mental instability was likely the death of her father. In fact, when her father died, she kept his body in her house for three days before someone intervened to arrange a proper burial. Also, through progressing onward through the story, it is revealed that a man Emily once thought she was going to marry left her, likely contributing to her addiction to constant companionship. It is fascinating, yet troubling to think of the corruption abandonment has elicited in Emily, and I can't help but refer back to my Psychology class from last year and the depth of the pain she had to have felt in her previous experiences with men to have the need to sleep with a decomposing corpse to keep her company.
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