Comparing and Contrasting - Stories

Introduction

This essay is the comparison of the two stories namely, “Sonny's blues” and “Rose for Emily”. Both the stories belong to different genre of art but the common thing is that both the stories have used art of symbolism to depict various concepts. Following is the discussion over the use of symbolism in the two stories.

Comparison

The narrator in Sonny Blues, is a teacher in Harlem, who has escaped the ghetto, creating a stable and secure life for himself despite the destructive pressures that he sees destroying so many young blacks. He sees African American adolescents discovering the limits placed on them by a racist society at the very moment when they are discovering their abilities (Kinnamon, Pp. 24-26). In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner imitates associative Southern storytelling style as an unnamed first-person narrator speaks for the entire town of Jefferson, relating what all the townspeople know or believe. Unlike typical Faulkner stories that employ multiple individual narrators, “A Rose for Emily” achieves the effect of multiple narrators by combining them into a single narrative voice, an unnamed (and not always consistent) narrator (Peek and Robert, Pp. 29-33). In Sonny Blues, the opposition between moments of meaning in loving community and the terrifying, troubled, and apparently meaningless outside world pervades the story in theme and in technique (Kennedy and Dana, Pp. 17-22). The opposition appears in multiple guises. It appears in the housing project where the narrator lives, an attempt to impose order on the old dangerous neighborhood that fails when the project is transformed into merely a new version of the old dangerous neighborhood. The opposition is reflected in his memories of childhood, of being secure in families, not having yet to deal with the horrors of the world, and yet being aware even as a child, that with each passing moment, he came closer to having to live unprotected in the dark, chaotic world. The narrative sequence in this story is not chronological; the reader learns Miss Emily's history in much the same way a newcomer to Jefferson might hear about her history. As the story opens, Miss Emily apparently has just died, and the townspeople are discussing her strange and sad life. Faulkner relates various incidents in her life, but these incidents are related thematically, not chronologically. Faulkner builds suspense by imitating the southern storyteller's style of describing people and events through situation-triggered ...