Comparison and Contrast of the Lottery and A Rose for Emily

Comparison and Contrast of the Lottery and A Rose for Emily

The two stories I choose to make the comparison and contrast is The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. The Lottery tells a story about the absurdity of a strange custom that every year one villager will be thrown to death due to the drawing result. A Rose for Emily describes the isolated life of Emily, who blindly insists on her own way regardless of the real world’s changes, as well as her love and hate, and disdainful of nobility and merciless retaliation for a cheating lover. As two famous and successful novels, these two stories have both common characteristic as well as differences. 

In terms of the themes of these two stories, although they tell different contents, they both use the writing method with symbolism and they are both the typical fables. The Lottery describes the drawing tradition in a village that lasts over for seventy years, and the villagers no longer question this cruel activity, even blindly following it. In the background of modern society, no matter for what reason, using stones to make a live person to death is extremely cruel, appalling, and uncanny punishment. The author clearly expresses the human nature of evil that hidden behind the traditions and customs. Jackson presents the topic of this article by symbolism method, namely exposing inherent human ignorance and callous and indifferent among villagers. And this symbolism is carried out throughout the story’s background, object, behavior characteristics, and even the specific settings of the names of the lucky participant. The author uses many writing methods in the novel to express his viewpoint, but the symbolism and irony are the two major ones.

Similarly, in the fiction of A Rose for Emily, the main character Emily had lived her whole life isolated, and her only lover is Barron from the north to pave the roads. However, these two people are totally different ones in separate worlds, as Barron represents the emerging culture in the north and the product of the industrial age that contains of travelling around, well informed, carpe diem and lacking of responsibility, while Emily is one who clings to her homes and uphold the noble status in spite of the new things, struggling in the falling of the south prosperity. After Barron’s abandon, Emily wants to kill her for revenge in her new marriage room, and this is also an obvious symbol of the clash between the two different kinds of life. Faulkner names this novel by an unusual title which is painstaking, suggesting that he is mourning the things that have gone with time. To be specific, in his ideology, the southern United States history, culture, value, concept and other complex mentality have been brought into his writing. This story reflects the truth that he told some reservations about the processes in the American history.   

However, these two stories are done by different writers, and they naturally have different writing styles, among which the most obvious one is the structure of the novels. First of all, The Lottery is written in an order description that begins by setting the background and scenes of the story. To be specific, the author lays a good background of the story from the start, creating a quiet and peaceful atmosphere. The beginning of the story is a typical small village in an unusual summer day, and this is also an irony to the ending. First of all, the author sets the time as a summer day that school has just left the summer vacation, and this explains why children can only be seen in the day to run around and scattering the infectious. Furthermore, the author describes the flowers were blossoming profusely, and the grass was richly green. This environment description gives a sense of tranquility and peace to the readers. And readers will not feel uncomfortable as there would be no bad things happen in this quiet village. In comparison, this is a normal way of telling a story, and people may even be familiar or bored with this ordinary beginning.

However, A Rose for Emily starts with Emily’s death, and this is a typical usage of flashback description method. The death of Emily seems to be a curtain of her life’s dancing stage is lifted, causing the readers to follow the people in the town of the novel to see her secretive and original passion of life. This description method can attract the readers’ attention when they firstly see the chapter. And the story later tells the life story of Emily, making the readers feel as if they are the villagers in the novel that gradually learn more about Emily’s life.

In addition, as to the theme of these two stories, we can see that The Lottery is more irony and absurd that it expresses the aversion of the traditions and the cold nature of human, while A Rose for Emily seems to be brighter that it expresses more memorable emotion that related to history of the United States and the conflicts between people in the historical background. Therefore, these two stories have a similar writing method as symbolism, while they have distinguished article structures and themes.