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How does love drive the plots of "A Rose for Emily" and "Killings"? Why is "Killings" plural, and how are flashbacks used in it?
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In "A Rose for Emily" and "Killings," love drives the plot through obsession and revenge. Emily kills out of a distorted sense of love shaped by her upbringing, while in "Killings," Matt and Ruth Fowler's love for their son leads to revenge against his murderer, Richard Strout. The title "Killings" is plural due to multiple murders, both literal and emotional. Flashbacks in "Killings" provide context for the motivations and emotional depth behind the characters' actions.
Love is a driving force in both William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” and Andre Dubus’s “Killings .” Emily Grierson is a disturbed woman whose concepts of love and relationships are fatally tarnished by her upbringing, her father having discouraged Emily from romantic connections. She lives a sheltered existence even after her father’s death and lives a solitary life with an aging African American housekeeper. The nature of her existence ultimately leads to the tragic developments that are revealed in the story’s conclusion. Emily has killed out of love, but it is not the purity of love that characterizes Matt and Ruth Fowler's feelings for their murdered son Frank. Nor is it the purity of love that leads Richard Strout to murder Frank. Both Emily Grierson and Richard Strout kill out of obsession. Both have serious psychological issues that are unresolved, albeit Emily can be considered...
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a product of her environment and upbringing, while Richard displays the characteristics of a psychopath who is innately evil. Emily is a pathetic figure; Richard is a criminal. Of the killings that occur in these stories, it is Matt and Ruth’s murder of Richard that best exemplifies love. They (Ruth was not directly involved in the murder but is certainly morally and possibly legally complicit) plan and murder Richard Strout out of revenge, so painful is the loss of their son and so maddening the failure of the criminal justice system.
Dubus undoubtedly used the plural form of “killing” simply because multiple murders occur in his story. Frank’s murder is related in flashback sequences that explain the melancholy opening to “Killings” in the cemetery following Frank’s burial. Frank’s older brother, Steve, tells Matt, “I should kill him.” The stage is set for a murder motivated out of a desperate need for justice. Matt executes that mission. In the flashbacks, we learn of the nature of Frank’s death at the hands of the brutal, remorseless, and jealous former husband of his girlfriend. There are two killings is this story. Although, motivations differ in terms of the psychological conditions at play. There is, however, another, more metaphorical application of the word “killing.” That is the emotional deadening of Matt and Ruth following Frank’s death. They are still physically alive, but something inside both died when their youngest son was shot and killed.
Flashbacks, as noted in the above paragraph, are used to establish setting and to relate the motivations behind that opening scene at the cemetery. Flashbacks are routinely used by writers of both literature and film as a narrative tool to fill in vital gaps in stories. Why is this protagonist acting the way he or she is? What happened that has motivated this character to act in this manner? Flashbacks are an important device that help convey better than perhaps would occur in a more linear structure the motivations of the protagonist(s). They can lend the narrative a greater emotional effect. That is certainly the case in “Killings.”