Time Heals All Wounds

Experiencing the loss of a loved one can make you feel empty inside, with an incomplete feeling that the world will never be the same again, and nothing will heal your pain. This loss could be someone who has passed away or someone who has become absent from your life. Either way people cope with loss or change in many different ways and “A Rose for Emily” or “Some Memories of My Father” are two prime examples. These essays remind us what it feels like to have someone you love depart from your life .

The feeling of losing someone you love no matter the situation can make you feel discombobulated, eccentric, saddened, confused, and filled with unanswered questions or vague thoughts and memories. Furthermore, both stories focus on with how dealing with loss or change sometimes causes psychotic thoughts and actions and many other psychological issues that can affect everyone around you. Together these stories symbolize the social changes in our society and community and the radical changes to tradition.

These stories are given from the narrators view point and we receive their opinions and feelings about not only the main characters but the events that are happening in their community. In Faulkner’s, “A Rose for Emily”, the story has a very gothic and grim setting to it. The narrator describes how this particular town has a moody and forbidding atmosphere; a crumbling old mansion; and decay, putrefaction, and grotesquerie. Faulkner’s work uses the gripping elements to highlight an individual’s struggle against an oppressive society that is undergoing rapid change.

A prime example the narrator express is, unit 12 public health p1 “Only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. ” (Section 1. 2) It is obvious that the narrator does not approve of Miss Emily’s surrounding area. It is quite possible the narrator is dissatisfied with everyone in the town, perhaps this particular period in American history. The second paragraph of the first section the story gives clues we need to find out what the story is saying about America.

The story shows how difficult it was for southern people to deal with the new America (post slavery) represented by the Emancipation Proclamation. In comparison, the short story “Some Memories of My Father”, is more modern day and have a hint of familiarity and nostalgia we all have witnessed and/or experience in our community one way or the other. Like many children who are abandoned by a loved one they tend to create memories or moments.

When his father disappears along with several other men from their blue-collar Detroit neighborhood, sixteen-year-old Michael Smolij witnesses the effects of large-scale abandonment on the community's wives and mothers. Our society more now than ever perhaps have seen a rapid decline of fathers in the household and many women left to be both mother and father to their children. The writer, Bakopoulos shares his experience with the loss of his father and what type of impact it made on his community.

In the story, the writer lets us know that things in the community have changed and he not only missed his father but the way things used to be. “Yes, it’s true that I miss my father, but in a larger sense, I missed all the fathers. ” (Need section from the story) He describes the things he saw as he drove past. ‘Neighborhoods like this could have been a million miles away from us. ” This short excerpt of the actual book allows the reader know that there is a mass epidemic of fathers exiting the home which leaves a lot of heartache and pain and many unanswered questions such as why?

Which is almost the same feeling one experiences one a loved one passes away. Was it the tough labor of working that caused this, mental illness from war, lack of a role model in the home for them, or some under lying child hood demons caused these men to abandoned their responsibilities? This is still a question we are asking today in 2013. Well whatever it is, it made the writer say, “Now the only thing that remains: When I was sixteen, my father went to the moon.

” (Need section from the story) Secondly, it is adequate to say that both stories have similar literary styles. Both uses flashback and foreshadowing. You can also contrast the different styles as well. In “A Rose for Emily” the story is not in conventional order and chronologically complex. Emily’s life is portrayed through a series flashbacks starting with a scene from her funeral. From there the story is told over a course of many decades which also intertwines with the first point that was made which was the changes that were happening in society and in the community.

The foreshadowing in this story is very important and ties in very closely with the complexity of the chronological order of events that take place. Because there are so much back and forth unchronological methods presented in this story there is not proper description of the sequence of events that allows the reader to know what ever happened to Homer or her refusal to let her father be buried? We know about odor, poison, and disappearance. It is up to the reader to figure out Emily buys poison, Homer disappears, and there is a mysterious odor.

I believe Faulkner wanted this to be as less obvious as possible in order to have the reader truly understand the complexity of the characters and this period in history. In the second story, “Some Memories of My Father”, the flashbacks are definitely in chronological in order. In fact, the author is describing to the reader moments he had written down in his notebook. He goes to stay, “I listed a few memories I had in a notebook, afraid they might leave me”.

From age three to sixteen he describes an expert from his childhood and a memory he had of his father. To the reader, the foreshadowing may seem very obvious because each year it seems things with his father seemed to get more disturbing but when he reached at sixteen and the story ends with “Now the only thing remains: When I was sixteen, my father went to the moon. ” This leaves the reader stunned and confused and open to interpret the statement in many ways. Some may assume he died or an insane asylum.

The writer leaves you at the edge of the cliff and open to believe whatever you want because all along he is trying to hold on to the few memories he have even if his father was just a vague piece of it. In summary, both stories have many similarities and differences that can be compared and contrasted. I think the most obvious conclusions from both stories is that although losing a loved is very difficult time does heal all wounds? Also, both stories are about the impossible things we believe because the truth may simply be too hard to deal with.

We saw this first hand from Emily and have difficulty the excepting the loss of her father and with Michael in excepting his father is ill and not coming back as he is “gone to the moon”. Both characters have gone through major changes in our society and dealt with them in their own form and fashion. John F. Kennedy once said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. ” (Kennedy, 1963) View as multi-pages