Comparison between A Rose for Emilyby William Fulkner, and BattleRoyal by Ralph Ellison - Research Paper Example

The setting of the story is in Faulkners imaginary city, Jefferson, in his imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha in Mississippi. The story is about an unusual spinster, Emily Grierson, the anonymous narrator gives the particulars the odd circumstances of Emily’s living and her strange relationships with her lover, her father and the town of Jefferson. The narrator also details the horrible secret Emily hides from the world. In a small number of pages, A Rose for Emily, cover roughly three-quarters of a century; from the birth of Emily Grierson which takes place sometime just about the Civil War, while her death happens sometime in the early 1930s.

The Reconstruction following the Civil War had a deep and humbling consequence on Southern society. The South’s dated agricultural estate economy, centered so long upon slave labor, was overwhelmed by emancipation. Northern investors, recognized as ‘‘carpet-baggers,’’ came in large numbers to capitalize on the economic chaos. A number of Southern top class people found themselves employed on the farms together with tenant farmers and earlier slaves. Faulkner happened to come from a family that once possessed a plantation (Marie ¶ 4).

The past of his family plus that of the South in general was completely overturned by the reconstruction after the civil war. According to Royden (372), from the fact that Faulkner comes from a family background with an aristocratic attitude and linked with other comparable families, he was conversed with the arrogance of behaviors like the Griersons where Rose came from. A number of these people persisted to act as if they were still fortunate plantation owners even though their wealth had disappeared.

Nevertheless, Faulkner used up much of his time examining ordinary townspeople too and this gives the reason why he was capable of capturing the voice of the ordinary people of