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Motives for Murder in “Killing’s” and “A Rose for Emily”

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 freez

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Matt is obviously still unhappy at the end when he has a “sob that he kept silent in his heart” (p.

The couple in “Killings” wants to achieve a sense of closure from the experience, but Emily wants the opposite. She refuses to move forward in time and accept that things change.

Matt, in contradiction, does not want to stop time; he wants to change the past. e time; so she kills the man she loves, Homer, so that he may never leave her. He did not bring his son back to life, and Emily eventually became a victim of time when she dies. Also Matt’s wife encounters their son’s killer in town causing Matt to carry a gun with him. Though he had been dead for three days, “she told them her father was not dead” (p. She has found the person that she wants to spend the rest of her life with, and nothing is going to change her mind. But the reader can have compassion for both cases because neither one achieves their goal at the end.

610 Words.

Though neither murder is justifiable, a homicide in which a man seeks retaliation for the death of his son will incline the reader to feel more sympathy than they would feel for a woman who simply refuses the thought of change. Matt loses his son because a jealous man has a bad temper. Matt seeks vengeance when he plans to kill Strout.

Approximate Word count = 601
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

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