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A Rose for Emily: the Main Themes Essay Example

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A Rose for Emily: the Main Themes Essay Example
The main themes of “A Rose For Emily” is apathy and death. The story

is about a woman who’s life has been filled with apathy and pity from

everything around her. The plot, characters, and tone help describe

the theme of this story.

The tone of this story always seems to be quite depressing. It starts

off with Miss Emily passing away. The whole town goes to her funeral

because she was such a big figure for her town. Throughout the story,

she starts to be come a recluse when her father dies, and later on in

her life, the townspeople think she has become suicidal because she

goes to the drug store to buy some arsenic. It is depressing to see t

hat the all the townspeople think she wants to kill herself and that it

would be for the best. “So the next day we all said, ‘She will kill

herself’, and we said it would be the best thing. (119) Everyone just

seems to always feel bad for her.

The main characters of this story are Miss Emily, the townspeople, and

Homer Barron. Miss Emily herself seems to have lived a hard life and

get let go of things. A good example of this would be her fathers death

and tried all she could to prevent the body from being buried, as well

as the townspeople finding the corpse of Homer in her house. The

townspeople are considered characters because they are the ones

talking throughout the story and are always commenting on Emily and

always assume what is going to happen. They never seem to think

that good things will come for her except for the short sudden moment

of her meetings with Homer Barron. Homer is the man that the

townspeople think starts having a relationship with Emily. They

actually were happy for Emily at first but that starts to become

doubted when he remarks that he liked men and liked to drink with

the younger ones. The biggest think about Home is the discovery of

his corpse during the climax of the story, which helps

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