"A Rose for Emily" and "Old Gardiston"

A Rose for Emily

This was probably one of my favorite readings so far. It is very fast, the action is going very rapid. However, at the same time the backflashes pauses the action for a moment and puzzle you a bit feeding you with the information to solve the riddle and to understand what it was all about.

Another supremely exciting element was that the author never explains what he meant exactly, but let the reader conclude by himself what was going on. For example, that she was buying the poison for someone else, hinting the murder. The best detail however was at the end, when the “long strand of iron-gray hair” was found on the pillow next to the decaying corpse. The motive of necrophilia is creepy but the author never mentions is directly and that is what makes this short story so good.

Old Gardiston

This one was one of my least favorite stories. The introduction was so long and too full with details that weren’t necessary to realize how rich the Southern house looked at the beginning and to show the decaying and charm loosing with the sort of poverty with time.

The time has stopped in that house, the manners stayed the same, but the house was leaking towards the slow self destruction cause by the consequences of the war. “Bitterly, bitterly poor was the whole Southern country in those dreary days after the war.”  Basically what this story is about the merge of the military and well standing but ill-thought off North, and poor, bitter and sad South and how one changes the opinion of the other and by doing that the house, symbolizing the old times before the war, burned to the ground. “It kept its word: in the morning there was nothing left. Old Gardiston was gone!”