Paper Topic:

Literature and Community

Literature can reflect the lives of individual characters and more importantly it can allow the reader to put the character or conflict in context by revealing the community through the eyes of the individual In the instances of William Faulkner 's A Rose for Emily ' and John Updike 's A

' the community plays a central role for the narrator The community and people are filtered through the lens of Sammy the checkout boy and the unknown narrator . Both belong as part of the larger community but their observations allow the reader to

glean a closer though biased look of the other characters such as Emily and the girls roaming through the A

. Their narrations reveal the closed sensibilities of two communities separated by decades and the leaps of modernity , but the New England town of Updike 's story is no less judgmental or structured than the Faulkner 's 19th century southern community

In A Rose for Emily ' Faulkner shows Emily only through the eyes of the other community members . Haughty and self-contained , she is part of the community legend but not part of the reality of the town , described from the beginning as a tradition , a duty , and a care a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town (Faulkner , W . 2001

.79 . Their day-to-day lives continue with or without the presence of Emily , her death excites only curiosity . She is a living eccentricity who in her secrecy has elicited the town 's curiosity . They feel not d...

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