Literature & Community Essay

Literature gage reflect the lives of individual(a) mentions and more importantly it can allow the reader to put the character or conflict in context by revealing the corporation through the eyes of the individual. In the instances of William Faulkners A Rose for Emily and magic trick Updikes A&P, the familiarity plays a central role for the narrator. The participation and people are filtered through the lens of Sammy the checkout boy and the hidden narrator. some(prenominal) be pine as part of the larger fraternity exactly their observations allow the reader to glean a closer, though biased facet of the other(a) characters such as Emily and the girls roaming through the A&P. Their narrations reveal the unlikable(a) sensibilities of two communities separated by decades and the leaps of modernity, further the novel England t protest of Updikes story is no less judgmental or structured than the Faulkners 19th century southern fellowship.In A Rose for Emily, Faulkner sho ws Emily except 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 line of descent as a tradition, a duty, and a care a illuminate of hereditary obligation upon the town(Faulkner, W. 2001 p.79).Their day-to-day lives continue with or without the strawman of Emily, her death excites only curiosity. She is a living eccentricity who in her secrecy has evoke the towns curiosity. They feel not pleased exactly but vindicated (2001 p. 80) in Emilys unfitness to marry successfully and heartened by the pity they can feel for her financial straits.The individual woman has long fallen to the government agencyside as the legend of her odd nature is scoop out as lore. Presented through the eyes of the narrator, the reader never really attains a complete understanding of Emily as an individual character. Instead, Faulkner presents both facts and suppositions to show the change of gossip and fact that had created the fable of Emily. Stripped of her individuality by her inability to be part of the community and the communitys inability to harmonize her, Emily becomes a two-dimensional caricature of a woman.The reality of her preceding years, shown in the long-dead corpse lying in the bridal chamber and the gray hairs-breadth upon the pillow beside, will simply be added to this myth. The narrator makes no exertion to explain this strange image but implies in the form of the residuum of the story that this will be added to the legend.Faulkners story shows how the community can change an individual into a story, through their perceptions and judgments. Updikes A&P shows a similar trend in how judgmental assumptions can supplant the reality of an individual. The community in this case is the closed community of an afternoon supermarket crowd who represent the town at large. In much the way Faulkners narrator reflects the views of the town, Sammy expresses and relays the perceptions of the few house-slaves in pin curlers (Updike, J., 2001 p. 33) and the judgmental manager.His observations of the other people in the supermarket and their reactions to the girls, both verbal and non-verbal, show the communitys perception of the girls character based on shallow assumptions. Sammy also unwittingly reduces the girls to embodiments of his own sexual desires. While he is outraged at the treatment they receive, he seems more bothered by the way the opinions of the community vary his own vision of the Queenie (2001 p. 32) and her friends.Like Emily, the girls represent myths for Sammy individually and the community. For Sammy the myth is created from his own hormone fueled ideals that inspire him to the heroic gesture of quitting his job. But why did he not simply stand up for the girls? It is simple, he has created in his minda romantic myth where he is the hero, and they the damsels in distress. For the community, the girls repr esent a myth of the immorality and indecency of youth. Their exposed flesh merely highlights their growing maturity date from the easy acceptance of little girls to questionable teenagers on the cusp of womanhood.Both stories show how the myths of individuals can be created by the perceptions and attitudes of their communities. These myths exist outside the closed ranks of the community because the the communitys inability to accept their dissimilarity. With Miss Emily the difference lies in her eccentricies. For the Queenie and her friends their difference lies in the communitys difficulties in harmonize these generational changes with the children they once were and the women they would become. Unable to accept these women as part of the communitys indentity, they are reduced to mere myths in the eyes of the community members.ReferencesFaulker, W. (2001). A Rose for Emily. In R. Diyanni (Ed.). Literature Reading Fiction, Poetry and Drama. (5th ed.). New York McGraw Hill. pp. 79 .Updike, J. (2001). A&P. In R. Diyanni (Ed.). Literature Reading Fiction, Poetry and Drama. (5th ed.). New York McGraw Hill. pp. 32.