Anton Chekhovs `Heartache` and William Faulkners `A Rose for Emily`

Throughout his work Faulkner demonstrates this ability to create char formers whose bareness functions both(prenominal) as a dramatic fact and as a psychological theme. In The Sound and the Fury Quentin Compsons personal despair, or sense of sealed isolation, is related to his puritan meddling with the lives of others. In As I destroy Dying the private members of the Bundren family are motivated by secret and l angiotensin converting enzymesome desires that are in strong contrast to the apparent solidarity of the family venture.Darl Bundrens madness is the impairment he pays for a full understanding of human l unmatchedliness, of how the clotting which is you struggles to guard its identity in the relentless flux of time. The moral themes of Light in August are directly related to Joe Christmass puritan loneliness. But his loneliness is only a product of his desperate search for moral absolution. gentleman isolation is implicitly identified in such novels with the search for selfhood in a dynamic and time-ridden homo.An individuals sense of isolation is neer a calibre imposed upon him by constituent it is rooted in human nature, and circumstances only bring to light its destructive consequences. Loneliness has its particular opening at the heart of puritan self-consciousness, when man tries to create a breakwater of morality and reason against the fear that nonhing in this cosmea actu wholey matters. Only Faulkners nonrational characters are free of the destructive fluctuation mingled with moral pride and amoral despair.His primitive characters are never lonely they never see themselves as isolated human bestridents. Faulkners success in portrayal human loneliness lies in the fact that only individuals can be lonely and the characters of his early novels are always individuals. But in Faulkners subsequentlyward novels a characters sense of isolation is treated primarily as an crochet or universal theme. The opposition between man and his social world becomes a question of philosophy and not of dramatic organization.Atmosphere is defined in the Dictionary of World Literature as The particular world in which the neverthelessts of a invention or a p set up occur time, place, conditions, and the incidental mood. When, as in A Rose for Emily, the world interpret is a confusion between the sometime(prenominal) and the present, the airwave is one of distortionof ineffectuality. This unreal world results from the suspension of a natural time order. Normality consists in a decorous progression of the human being from birth, with youth, to age and finally expiry. Preciosity in children is as monstrous as incapacity in the adult, because both are unnatural.Monstrosity, however, is a sentimental subject for fictionalisation unless it is the result of human put to deaththe result of a forgetful go about to circumvent time. When such circumvention produces acts of violence, as in A Rose for Emily, the atmosphere b ecomes one of horror. Horror, however, represents only the extreme form of malad thoed nature. It is not produced in A Rose for Emily until the final act of violence has been disclosed. All that has asleep(p) before has prepared us by producing a general tone of voice of mystery, foreboding, decay, etc. so that we may say the entire series of events that boast gone before are in keythat is, they are depicted in a mood in which the final violence does not appear too shocking or horrible.We are inclined to say, In such an atmosphere, anything may happen. Foreshadowing is often accomplished through atmosphere, and in this case the atmosphere prepares us for Emilys unnatural act at the terminus of the story. Emily is portrayed as a fallen monument, a monument for reasons which we s abode see after, fallen because she has shown herself susceptible to death (and decay) after all.In the mention of death, we are well-read (as the psychologist says) for the more specific concern with it later on. The second paragraph depicts the indwelling ugliness of the contrast the rendering of Miss Emilys house lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay in a higher place the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumpsan eyesore among eyesores. (A juxtaposition of past and present. ) We deal this scene as an emblematic presentation of Miss Emily herself, suggested as it is through the excogitates stubborn and coquettish. The toneand the contrastis preserved in a description of the note which Miss Emily sent to the mayor, a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, and in the description of the interior of the house when the deputation from the panel of Aldermen visit her They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and negligencea close, dank smell. In the next paragraph a description of Emily discloses her similarity to the house She looked bloated, like a b ody long semiaquatic in motionless water, and of that pallid hue.Emily had not always looked like this. When she was unripened and part of the world with which she was contemporary, she was, we are told, a slender figure in white, as contrasted with her drive, who is described as a spraddled silhouette. In the picture of Emily and her father together, framed by the door, she frail and apparently hungering to participate in the vitality of her time, we contain a reversal of the contrast which has already been presented and which is to be highly-developed later.Even after her fathers death, Emily is not monstrous, but rather looked like a miss with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows ramify of tragic and serene. The suggestion is that she had already begun her entrance into that nether-world (a world which is depicted later as rose-tinted), but that she might even yet have been saved, had bulls eye Barron been another kind of man. Just as Emily refus ed to ack this instantledge the death of her father, she now refuses to recognize the death of Colonel Sartoris. He had given his word, and according to the traditional view, his word knew no death.It is the Past pitted against the correspond the Past with its social decorum, the Present with everything set down in the books. Emily dwells in the Past, always a world of unreality to us of the Present. Here are the facts which set the tone of the story and which create the atmosphere of unreality which surrounds it. It is important, too, to realize that during the period of Emilys courtship, the town became Emilys affiliate in a contest between Emily and her Grierson cousins, because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been. The cousins were protecting the general proprieties against which the town (and the times) was in gradual rebellion. Just as each succeeding generation rebels against its elders, so the town took sides with Emily against her relations. Had homing pigeon Barron been the proper kind of man, it is implied, Miss Emily might have escaped both horns of the dilemma (her cousins traditionalism and Homers immorality) and become an accepted and value member of the community.The towns attitude toward the Grierson cousins represents the usual ambiguous attitude of man toward the past a mixture of veneration and rebelliousness. The un doctrinefulness of Homer represents the final act in the drama of Emilys struggle to escape from the past. From the moment that she realizes that he will desert her, tradition becomes magnified out of all proportion to breeding and death, and she conducts herself as though Homer really had been faithfulas though this view represented reality.Miss Emilys position in regard to the specific chore of time is suggested in the scene where the old soldiers appear at her funeral. in that location are, we are told, two views of time (1) the world of the present, viewing time as a mechanica l progression in which the past is a decrease road, never to be encountered again (2) the world of tradition, viewing the past as a huge meadow which no winter ever sort of touches, divided from (us) now by the narrow bottleneck of the most new-fangled decade of years. The first is the view of Homer Barron and the modern generation in Jefferson.The second is the view of the older members of the Board of Aldermen and of the confederate soldiers. Emily holds the second view, pull that for her there is no bottleneck dividing her from the meadow of the past. Emilys small room above stairs has become that timeless meadow. In it, the living Emily and the dead Homer have remained together as though not even death could separate them. It is the monstrousness of this view which creates the final atmosphere of horror, and the scene is intensified by the portrayal of the unchanged objects which have surrounded Homer in life.Here he lay in the roseate atmosphere of Emilys death-in-life What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust. The symbols of Homers life of action have become mute and silent. Contrariwise, Emilys world, though it had been inviolate while she was alive, has been invaded after her deaththe whole gruesome and unlovely tale unfolded.In the first place, she has been cross by her father, prevented from participating in the life of her contemporaries. When she attempts to achieve freedom, she is betrayed by a man who represents the new morality, threatened by disclosure and humiliation. Loneliness is associated rhetorically with abstract humanity. Simultaneously it becomes a cause less for despair than for hidden affirmation, a theme related in A Fable to the Marshals faith in irrevocable human evil.The loneliest experience of all, the reader is told in this novel, is just breathi ng. But in its identification with the human condition, the opinion of loneliness loses all personal meaning. Only by declining to state such identifications can the novelist successfully establish them. In his best work Faulkner demonstrates that loneliness is a particular, never a universal state of mind. Loneliness is not an abstract concept of human experience but the world in which each individual must live.Chekhov in his story, Heartache, dealt with being old and alone in the city. In Heartache, an old cabby lamented the fact that his son had died before him. He was because alone with no one to take care of him and with no one to learn from him. He was completely alone, abused by people, with no one to help him bear his grief. He earned enough to feed his buck and not much else. He slept on a bench in a large room with the other cabbies. One wonders how long he would last with hunger, cold, and loneliness on his old, tired heels. (Williames 132)