Deadly insane love, insanely lovely death
How does one deal with the death of love, if not with insanity?
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In exploring the elements of characterization and point of view, Antonio Elefano’s “Italy” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” are great pieces of prose to flesh out, as the stories are told with the rich recounting of the narrators. Here, I compare how both tales grapple with the notion of insanity as an offspring, possibly, of love and death.
Deadly insane love
Elefano’s “Italy” opened with the narrator saying that they had been dating for exactly eleven months and fourteen days — hinting at his rational personality and immense love for his lover. He is self-aware of his logical and perceptive nature and described how his wife had always been his favorite to observe and let his mind sing about silently. I was convinced that he loved her intensely from the way he mused about her smiles and gestures and even thoughts, at times.
Early into the story, he said, “I have never been a person to say things for the sake of saying them.” That he isn’t one to lazily construct ramblings to his dearests for it was unnecessary and could be harmful.
But in the end, he pleaded, almost as a prayer:
“Though it must be clear by now, though you already knew it, it deserved to be said a thousand times over. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
If, back then, he uttered those verbiages recklessly, would his lonely present be any different? Would his lover tell him of her plans to spend the rest of her life under the experimental trial? Would he ever come to know what she felt all this time too long for some sense of utility?
The way he loves her is (silently) insane that it became the death of them.
When the woman was diagnosed with cancer, the narrator only “absorbed her fits of anger” and dealt with the emotions weighing him down as much on his own. I saw this as the point wherein they started to drift away emotionally — the woman began to grieve and cope on her own, the man only being able to observe, but not understand her anymore, all due to lack of communication. Perhaps, they both loved their tale of Italy the most for it was the moment they still had each other completely.
Not to anyone, even to himself. Even when his partner passed, the man did not explicitly show his grief, consistently. He drowned himself with work. And who knows? Perhaps, he was already swimming in his insanity as he did. Emptiness might feel safe, but it definitely doesn’t look so.
His misery only began to truly show when he started citing their story of Italy out loud, which frightened him. Finally, the deepest emotions he’d been trying so hard to eclipse resurfaced. And when he, at long last, admitted that he should have told her he loved her more, a thousand times more, he finally faced and embraced his grief.
Just like the narrator’s point of view, I, the reader, can only watch from a limited viewpoint. Even so, his characterization was defined and consistent and I was able to get where his thoughts and actions were coming from, though frustratingly so. However, in the final two paragraphs, he and I shared the same emotion — grief and longing for the onehe had lost, and the tales that terrifyingly, could only be revisited through memories that could become unreliable with the passing of time.
Insanely lovely death
Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” started with the ending — Emily’s funeral. The narrator then proceeded to describe how only Emily’s seventies-style house was the only one left of its kind in the neighborhood. Not only the house but also her lifestyle, to the extent of refusing to build a mailbox and pay her current taxes. It seemed like for Emily; time did not continue to flow.
The narrator here is also an observer, but surely a lot harsher than the previous one. I depict the narrator as the one telling the whole community’s point of view itself, rather than being a single person since they know all the thoughts, rumors, and opinions of the people about Emily. Still, this narrator failed to even get the closest idea of who Emily was, despite the literal stalking and monitoring they did to her. With this, Emily also seemed to be their favorite to observe.
Both the narrator and the observed, Emily, have things of theirs that they were obsessed with. The narrator was obsessed with watching, scrutinizing, and making unfavorable assumptions about her daily life. They were subscribed to her littlest actions and would try to make sense of them. The narrators of “Italy” and “A Rose for Emily” both had limited viewpoints of their subjects, despite being so close to them. Emily’s obsession, on the other hand, was about freezing time, literally. It was already evident with her home and lifestyle, but her obsession becomes terrifyingly clearer when her necrophilia was revealed.
Emily also refused to grieve, but much more extreme. She didn’t cope at all because she made herself believe there was no misery. She did not allow herself any semblance of change, including death. It first happened with her father when she refused to have him buried. But the narrator mused, “She was crazy then.” It shows how narrators think negatively of Emily, but their opinions of her did not come close to how dark and grim she actually was. The next instance of her obsession was with Homer. She killed and married him — the fitting procedure to tie him down with her for eternity.
Perhaps, for Emily, death is lovely.
After all, someone would not be able to change, literally, after death. Even though the narrator failed to narrate Emily accurately, and her true character was only shown after she had died, and through less than five paragraphs of the story at that, she had a well-built characterization, nonetheless.
Elefano showed the love of someone facing immense regret for his lover. Faulkner conveyed the love of someone who would resort to extreme measures for her lover. In “Italy,” we saw how the narrator denied his grief but also became to embrace it or else it would descend him into insanity. In “A Rose for Emily,” Emily does not believe in grief at all for she was already a madwoman. Lastly, both narrators had become unreliable, having failed to fully understand the characters, despite being dedicated observers and all.
