英语论文网

She once was beautiful and slim, but her father drove all the men who pursued her. Only after her father died, she could date with a Northerner. Unfortunately, she could not marry with him, which hurt her so deeply that she had to keep herself far from the world from then on.

However, the ending is out of expectation. She was shrewd and unscrupulous. She secretly murdered her fiancé by rat poison, and kept his body in her bed and slept with him for forty years. It is really tricky and surprising. The ending may be unreasonable to some extent, but it really shows Faulkner's creativity. He adopts the flashback to add much profound meaning to the short story, which is superior to the normal narrative way of the general fictions. So at last, to people’s surprise, they found Emily was a cruel murderer, and people were shocked by the discovery.

In addition, the choosing of the narrator also reflects the gothic characteristics. Mostly the suspense is told by the narrator who doesn’t participate in the events he recounts, he’s not a character in the story but is someone not even named, who stands at some distant from the action recording what the main characters say and do, recording also what they think, feel, or desire (X. J. Kennedy & Dana Gioia, An Introduction to Fiction, 45). The narrator in A Rose for Emily is “we”, the people in town, but not the character Emily. After Emily’s father was dead, she didn’t went out as before, so as observers, people in the town narrated her actions and guessed her life according to her and her black servant’s action. They narrated Homer’s returning to Emily’s house, and they guessed they might get married. When they smelled the disgusting smell from Emily’s house, they guessed that her killing rats or snakes. And when Emily bought the rats poison, they guessed the poison was used for killing rats. So the narrator’s guess makes the story become more mysterious.

The flashback form and the choosing of the narrator grasp people’s curiosity for the suspense, and make the suspense more mysterious, and also reflect the gothic characteristics successfully. In a short, the narrative way created a mysterious and terrified atmosphere, so the gothic characteristics exist in the narrative way of the story.

3.4 The gothic characteristics in the Character

Usually, the characters in the gothic literature are eccentric and mysterious. And most characters are not ghost but real people who have twisted characteristic caused by their life experiences, such as their childhood, their parents’ influence and their love story, and they act in abnormal way. Because of the character’s twisted or eccentric characteristics, the story or the suspense appears in gothic characteristics. Mark Madoff(1979) took Lewis’s The Monk an example and pointed out that in fact, the description of the violent behavior in the gothic literature was the description of character’s repressed soul. The character of Emily in A Rose for Emily was a normal person, but the way she acted was very eccentric and mysterious, so people around her began to be curious about her life, and suspected her life.

(1) Em本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。