A Rose For Emily

The combination of words, create tone/mood in all stories; through those tones, a realization of certain aspects of life or an alternation of those views are intensified. Three short stories, "A Rose for Emily," "The Destructors," and the "Interpreter of Maladies," shine brightly in exemplifying how words used in a specifics order or meaning, create tone to alter one's opinions.

Darkness, death, sympathy, violence - all words that could be used to describe the tone of "A Rose for Emily." All the additive imagery throughout the story creates a final piece that speaks of love, lost; not of just Emily's lover, Homer, but of her father and her unwillingness to let go of who she loved most. This hits home for any person in the world who loves and wants to be loved in return. Emily's way of not letting go is to sleep with her dead lover for years after she killed him with arsenic, thus lending to the deathly violent and dark tones of the story.

Children without discipline, without the consciousness of peace and true happiness; surrounded by destruction, the Wormley Common Gang from, "The Destructors," makes it their mission to have happiness at the expense of others. When choice is involved (good vs. bad), a member chooses to do what the others would probably choose. Blackie, the previous leader of the gang, is a prime example of this inability to choose and his lack of self-discipline to do what's right. Once Blackie was replaced, he had walked away from the gang, had a thought about wanting to be apart of the new "hard" reputation of the gang, and walked back. The tone here is obviously that of one set on destruction - through material and immaterial. Innocence, their very beings (as they are only kids), is lost or corrupted slightly.

Quiet discontent, an emotion that runs, in reality, "loudly," throughout the "Interpreter of Maladies." Mrs. Das'