The Trust of a Reader
Although "A Rose for Emily," by William Faulkner and "A Tell- Tale Heart," by Edgar Allan Poe are both similar in that they tell a story of murder, both authors use a different approach with respect to point of view. In Faulkner's piece the narrator is in the first person but removed from the action, while Poe's narrator, although also a first person, is the central character in the story. Faulkner's character is someone that the reader can trust and identify with while Poe presents a character that is unreliable and may even be considered "mad". The identity of the narrator in "A Rose for Emily" is never revealed yet the reader seems to believe him. Since the narrator is not directly involved in the story, he has no reason to fabricate what takes place. The reader comes to understand that the narrator is part of the community or town in the first sen
tence when he says "our whole town went to her funeral" and that he speaks for the whole town. This about the "vulture eye" and how obsessed he is with it, the reader can call Poe's narrator insane, "until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of a spider, shot from out the crevice and full upon the vulture eye. It was open- wide, wide open-and I grew furious as I gazed upon it." tells the reader that he has a wealth of knowledge about the community and the history of Miss Emily. He conveys this when he shares several stories about Miss Emily, elaborating the alderman's visit to her house to collect the taxes: "A deputation waited upon her, knocking at the door through which no visitor's had passed since she stopped giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier." Since the narrator seems to know so much about the history of Miss Emily, it makes it even easi
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Approximate Word count = 598
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)
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