
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Ghost Story?- Possibly
In many ways, I can see how Faulkner could see this as a ghost story. It is told in hindsight after Emily's death, so she's dead the whole time. Still, it is so unlike any other ghost story I've ever read. For the most part, ghost stories are about what happens to the person (or spirit) after they have died. They usually go into detail about why the person's spirit is trapped between the world of the dead and our world, but that is usually a fairly small part of the story because the author usually focuses on what the ghost has to go through and what the people who are being haunted by the ghost have to experience before the ghost has that aha! moment and goes forward to the other side. Stereotypically, these ghost stories are about a lost love or a grudge held that the ghost has to let go of to leave the place in-between, but this story has none of that. I suppose Emily's spirit is alive in the story as the narrator tells it and the reader knows that she is dead but does not know why or how it happened and does not know why the death was such a scandal. Also, the addition of another dead person at the end makes it seem even more like a ghost story than it initially did when the town burden (aka Emily) had passed away.
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