While Matt from "Killings" by Dubus and Emily from Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" have similar motives for the murders they commit, the justification of either is challengeable. Both Matt and Emily kill out of love for someone, but Matt's murder is for closure after his son Frank is killed, whereas Emily's is because she is afraid of being alone.
             Emily is portrayed by the narrator, who seems to speak for the whole town, as being peculiar due to the manner in which her father raised her. The people of Jefferson see her as "a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town" (p. 70). She obviously has issues about her over-protective, selfish father, who would not allow her to date men even when she began an adult- "We remembered all the young men her father had driven away" (p. 75). Because she has already missed out on so much of life by the time her father dies, she feels the desire to freeze time; so she kills the man she loves, Homer, so that he may never leave her.
             Matt, in contradiction, does not want to stop time; he wants to change the past. He knows that murdering Strout will not bring his son back to life, but he is still convinced that it will make him feel better and more content. Also Matt's wife encounters their son's killer in town causing Matt to carry a gun with him. He says "I started carrying it after the first time she saw him in town" (p. 85); Ruth cannot bear to see Strout anymore, and even she wants to kill him. Having the support of his wife probably gives Matt even more encouragement to go through with his plan to take Strout's life.
             The couple in "Killings" wants to achieve a sense of closure from the experience, but Emily wants the opposite. She wants things in her life to stay the same, like her romance with Homer, thus refusing to accept the situations that happen in her life. Though he had been dead for three days, ...