A Rose for Emily, by Wiliam Faulkner

 Audiobook

Movie (Angelica Huston in it)

Written by Glòria Torner

SUMMARY
A Rose for Emily is William Faulkner’s best-known short story and, therefore, the most frequently anthologised. And it is also his first short story published in a national magazine, The Forum, in 1930, and, one year later, collected in These Thirteen. It was written during a period of great productivity of the author (1927-1931).
This story, with a non-linear structure, is narrated in the first-person plural, representing the voice of the people who give their opinions on the events, and it is divided in five sections.
Section I. Flashbacks. The ending and the beginning of the story.
The story begins at the end, after the death of Mrs Grierson, at the age of 74. That day, all the village, Jefferson, came to her funeral with respect and curiosity. People knew she didn’t let anyone inside her house, for decades, except her old negro servant, called Tobe.
Her house was once splendid, but, over the years, the aristocracy of Jefferson she belonged to decayed slowly. And now, of this house only remained the traces of grandeur.
In the old days, after Emily’s father died, the town mayor, Colonel Sartoris, made an exception for her —he decided she’d never have to pay taxes on the house. But time passed, and different people came into positions of power.
Ten years after the death of Colonel Sartoris, when Emily was sixty-two years old, the new mayor didn’t see the necessity to honour the agreement and decided to send Miss Emily a notice that she’d have to pay the taxes. She refused to pay, and a group of aldermen paid her a visit. Miss Emily’s old manservant let them into the parlour. The house was dirty and dusty and Emily appeared both overweight and wasted away, “she looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water and of that pallid hue”. She didn’t invite anyone to sit. Instead of that, she remained in the parlour’s entryway and listened to the men explain their purpose. Against all their protests, she informed them and repeated that she has no taxes in Jefferson, and told them to see Colonel Sartoris. Of course, he was long dead.
Section II. Going back on the plot
Two years after his father’s dead and some time after her sweetheart had deserted her, the villagers were asking the authorities to do something because a terrible smell was emanating from the house. But they couldn’t get it, because there was no law requiring the cleaning of a house’s interior. Therefore, the neighbours poured quicklime around this nauseating house.
Section III. Homer Barron’s introduction
After her father’s death, Emily, about forty years old, was ill for a long and she reappeared as a lonely woman. Suddenly, her life will change.
Homer Barron, a contractor and foreman of a crew of workers, comes to Jefferson to build sidewalks, and he begins a relationship with Emily. She is in love with Homer, her ideal man. The women of the town gossip about this relationship because they consider him far beneath him. However, Emily always maintains the same attitude, haughty, arrogant and cold, towards the neighbours.
One day, Emily is seen buying poison. The pharmacist asks her several times if it is for rats, but she, simply, replies she wants arsenic.
Section IV. Emily’s hate and madness
The collective narrator, “We”, highlights gossip, social pressure and a lack of empathy. This voice describes now how is Emily and what happens in her house. As always, telling the story without order, villagers talk about out Homer Barron: “he likes men”, he is gone, he is back… Finally, it seems that they want to be married because she has bought the wedding gear, men’s clothes and, even, a nightgown for him to sleep in.
Her cousins visited Rose when she was seeing Homer. One day, after her cousins’ visit, Homer Barron disappeared and no one knew ever anything about.
The villagers don’t see her again, except, from time to time, when they catch glimpses of her silhouette through the curtains.
Section V. Final twist. The horror. The surprising truth behind the mystery
The story returns to the beginning, the day of the funeral. After the burial, the neighbours went up to her second-floor room. They had to break down the door and there they found Homer’s skeleton, lying in Emily’s bedroom, decorated like a bridal suite. Now with the sentence “a grey hair was found on the pillow next to Homer’s corpse”, we know that she has been sleeping with his corpse for years.
Finally, Emily has killed the object of her affection, so he will not abandon her, and she will live forever with her corpse.
The main themes
Isolation and Patriarchal Control: loneliness, mental decline, madness and decay through the sordid and sad life of Emily Grierson.
Tradition vs Progress: the story describes the deterioration of Southern aristocracy, the social pressure, culminating in the murdering of her lover, Homer Barrow. She refuses to accept changes.
Southern Gothic Element: death, necrophilia, the final image of her iron-grey hair near her pillow.
Symbolism: the house —the decadence; the Yankee north Homer Barron —the ideal man; Emily’s hair grey and other dark colours —sadness; the smell —the unpleasant part of the story and, of course, the rose —symbol of Emily’s faded dreams of love and marriage.
As many times in the story, we finish repeating the same sentence written in the story: “Poor Emily!”.
If we want to read an author similar to William Faulkner, we can choose Flannery O’Connor, with her story A good man is hard to find.

QUESTIONS
-There's a character in the story without much relevance, the servant. According to your opinion, why is it so?
-There's case of necrophilia in the story. Most of sexual paraphilias are taboo. Do you know any and what are they about?
-The story is about lifestyles that die. With every new generation something dies. What will die with our generation? Do you particularly like the phrase "the good old days", or you prefer to forget them?

VOCABULARY
frame house, scrolled balconies, eyesore, bemused, sluggishly, spare, horse and foot, teeming, slunk, lime, locusts, vindicated, riggers, cuss, kin, fallen out with, craned, imperviousness, blowing off, cabal, remitted, doddering, valance curtains

A Family Supper, by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on the 8th of November 1954. He went to live in Great Britain in 1960, when his father began to research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey. As a boy, Kazuo enjoyed television, Westerns and spy stories, and wrote easily without entertaining any serious ambition of becoming a writer.

The great creative awakening of his adolescence came at the age of 13, when he discovered the songs of Bob Dylan. He spent the next years learning to play guitar, writing songs and studying the work of Dylan, Cohen... and other singer-songwriters of the time. After graduating in 1973, he took a year off to travel around the United States and Canada, and to make the round of record companies with demos of his songs, but these efforts were unsuccessful.

Although he still planned a career in music, Ishiguro studied literature and philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating, he moved to London. He supported himself by working in a homeless shelter in Notting Hill. While working at the shelter, he also met a young social worker, Lorna MacDougall. They fell in love and married in 1986.

Early novels

Ishiguro went to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia, in England. He began writing full-time following the success of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), which it is a first-person narrative of a Japanese widow living in England.  Ishiguro’s next novel was An Artist of the Floating World (1986). These two novels reflected on life and culture in post-World War II in Japan. However, for his next novel, he wanted to write for an international audience. So he chose an iconic British character known throughout the world: the English butler. The themes of guilt and regret are seen in the butler’s lost chance for love in The Remains of the Day (1989). This novel won the Booker Prize for fiction (1989), a prize dedicated to the best novel published in the United Kingdom and written in English. The novel was adapted to a film in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. 

 

Later Work

Ishiguro continued to experiment with different genres and styles in his subsequent novels, The Unconsoled (1995) and When We Were Orphans (2000). Taking the leap to science fiction, Ishiguro wrote a tale about genetic engineering and human cloning in Never Let Me Go (2005). Although he’s best known for his novels, Ishiguro has also published a collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009), and several screenplays, as The White Countess (2005).

His most recent book, The Summer We Crossed Europe in The Rain (March 2024), is a collection of lyrics written for the jazz singer Stacey Kent. Ishiguro and Kent have been friends and collaborators for a long time, and he wrote lyrics for a handful of songs on Kent’s Breakfast on the Morning Tram.

Ishiguro has won many awards, perhaps most notably the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Now he is a British citizen and lives in London with his wife and his daughter Naomi, who is also an author and published the book Escape Routes.

 

SUMMARY

This is the story of a Japanese family. The protagonist is a young man who returns to Tokyo from California to visit his father and his sister, Kikuko. At the beginning, the protagonist describes “Fugu”, a type of poisonous fish and its dangerous properties, if you don’t prepare it correctly. He tells us how his mother died two years ago because she ate “Fugu” prepared by a friend. When his mother died, he was living in California and he didn’t attend the funeral.

The son’s father picks him up from the airport and tells him the circumstances in which his mother died. His father is a very intimidating man, and he is proud of the pure samurai blood that runs in his family. He is a man who values a traditional family and is very strict. He and his son don’t have a good relationship; for this reason, the son did not return to his country until two years after his mother’s death. While they are waiting for the arrival of Kikuko, they talk a little about his father’s business partner, Watanaba, who killed himself and his family after the firm’s collapse, because he didn’t wish to live with the disgrace.

Soon after, Kikuko arrives. She is a student in Osaka. Despite the fact that the brother is much older, the siblings had always been close. They decide to go for a walk in the garden, while their father prepares the supper. Kikuko smokes a cigarette and tells him about her boyfriend and his plans for them to hitch-hike in America; she also tells him that their mother always blamed herself for him leaving Japan, that she thought she hadn’t raised him correctly. They have an open conversation, talking about their lives, childhood and recalling events like when he thought there was a ghost living in the garden near the well.

After this, the father calls Kikuko into the kitchen and tells her to help him with the final preparations of the supper. Then the father takes his son to another room to discuss his regrets about how he raised his children and how he should have been a more attentive father.

When the food is ready, the father encourages the son to eat a lot of the fish that he and Kikuko have prepared. During the meal, the son discovers a photograph on the wall with an old woman in a white kimono. His father reveals that it’s their mother, who resembles the ghost he used to see when he was younger. After the meal, Kikuko prepares some tea while the son and his father speak about the son’s future plans.

The story ends with a peaceful supper and a serious dialogue. The father expresses his hope that his children will come back home to live with him.

 

Some Reflections

It is possible that the father has made a decision: to repeat his partner’s actions. Perhaps he realizes that he could no longer manage the situation and decides to commit a form of suicide, and his children don’t know anything about it.

I think that the author wants to show how rebellion is an escape from social conventions and family expectations. Japanese culture puts a lot of pressure on children. They are usually raised very strictly, and we begin to understand why the protagonist left Japan and his family. Now his younger sister intends to do the same as her brother did in the past.

 

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about the poisonous fish “aranya” they fish in Blanes?

-What do you think it happened to the protagonist’s mother?

-What is it for you, the “honour”? Was Watanabe a man of principle? What is your opinion of the celebrated sentence “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.”?

-In your view, what was the ghost in the well or in the garden?

-According to your opinion, why did the son go back to Japan?

-What is the meaning of the mother’s picture in the story?

-What do you think it’s going to happen after supper? Why?

 

VOCABULARY

gutting, haunted, swayed, giggle

Analysis