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A rose for emily

Abcarian and Klotz define the Human Condition as, “ Man strives to give order and meaning to his life, to reduce the mystery and unpredictability that constantly threaten him. Life is infinitely more complex and surprising than we imagine, and the categories we establish to give it order and meaning are, for the most part, “ momentary stays against confusion. ” At any time, the equilibrium of our lives, the comfortable image of ourselves and the world around us, may be disrupted suddenly by something new, forcing us into painful reevaluation.

These disruptions create pain, anxiety, and even terror but also wisdom and awareness. ” The above quote states that all people learn by the same process. Initially there is a disruption. This is followed by an emotional response. The emotional response calls for action which will rectify the disruption. Once this is done, the person gains knowledge from the experience.

Emily in the short story, “ A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner (rpt. In Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2009] 526-534) is an example of a character who is altered by an aspect of the Human Condition. Emily’s disruption was the death of her father. Emily did not do well with change, and her fathers death was a painful disruption that she had to figure out how to deal with. Before he passed away, her family held themselves higher than everyone else in town. Emily felt as though no men were good enough for her, thus she wound up thirty and alone. Once her father passed away, all she had left was the house he left her.

Now she was no longer superior to the towns people, she was humanized. Her emotional response was her state of denial. After his death, the ladies of the town stopped by to offer their condolences and aid, but Miss Emily told them straight-faced that her father was not dead. She convinced herself that her father had not passed away, and for 3 days she refused to let the ministers and doctors bury his body. After they finally took away his corpse, she denied the change by remaining in her house and refusing to go outdoors.

The action she took was meeting a new man. After a while of being sick and staying inside her house, she took a liking to a construction worker, Homer Barron, and began appearing in public again. On Sunday afternoons she would be seen driving with Homer, and the towns people began to talk. A year later, she was seen out purchasing arsenic at the drugstore, claiming she was using it for rats. The towns people heard that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B on each piece.

A coupled days later they learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a night shirt, so they concluded that the two were married. The last anyone saw of Homer Barron was when he entered Miss Emily’s house at dusk one evening. For six months after that, she did not appear on the streets. The knowledge she gained was to learn to be controlling. She temporarily controlled her father after he passed away by refusing to give up his body, and she manipulated and controlled Homer because he was the object of her desire.

She had an issue with controlling things and people around her, and found change unbearable. She would not allow anyone to tell her what to do, she followed her own traditions by living in her own timeless world. Emily was altered by an aspect of the Human Condition because she experienced the disruption of her fathers death, had an emotional response which was her state of denail, met Homer Barron as her action, and gained knowledge from the experience by learning to be controlling.

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