A Rose For Emily
            
             After World War II, there were many changes occurring in the world. Man's inherent
            
             need to follow tradition was now being challenged by a changing, modern world. The
            
             past and the present often conflicted. William Faulkner, a southern born writer, based a
            
             story on this conflict. Faulkner reflects the turmoil of the past and the present in "A
            
             Rose For Emily."
            
             The conflict between the past and the present is symbolized in the beginning of
            
             Faulkner's story by this description, "only now Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its
            
             stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps - an
            
             eyesore among eyesores" (426) . It seems ironic that the same description "stubborn
            
             and coquettish decay" could also be a description for Miss Emily as well.
            
             As Faulkner begins the story, the reader quickly learns that this peice is going to be
            
             about death and dying. It is not so much as physical death, although physical death is
            
             also apparent, but spiritual, mental, and social decay. Dennis Allen writes, "we have a
            
             decaying mansion in which the protagonist, shut out of the world, grows into something
            
             monstrous, and becomes as divorced from the human as some fungus growing in the
            
             dark on a damp wall" (45). As defined in Websters dictionary, horror is "the strong
            
             feeling caused by something frightful or shocking" (239). At the end of "A Rose for
            
             Emily, the reader finds out that Miss Emily is performing a very deviant action. The
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             reader and the townspeople are very much shocked by this act. This story is described
            
             as truly "a story of horror" (Allen 46).
            
             The unnamed narrator, which some critics have identified as "the town" or at
            
             least a representative voice from it, in a seemingly haphazard manner, relates key
            
             moments in Emily's life, including the death of her father and a bri...