just as delusional, but she remains coolly detached from those around her, never feeling the need to explain herself to anyone. The ease with which she repels the deputation of public officials who try to collect taxes from her is in stark contrast to the frenetic conduct of Poe's narrator when confronted with the police. It is entirely fitting that, while the most potent symbols in Poe's story are the grisly open eye of the old man and a heart that goes on beating after death, the rose that symbolizes Faulkner's sympathy for Emily does not even appear in the story, except in the title.

Miss Emily is able to retain her mystique partly because, unlike "The Tell-Tale Heart," the story is not told from her point of view. Although she is a public figure in Jefferson, her privacy is so completely sacrosanct that, for from hiding Homer Barron's corpse under the floorboards, she leaves it in plain sight in a room which no one thinks to open until her death.

In these stories of suspicious deaths, the narrative is in first-person. In Edgar Allan Poe's story, this person is the self-confessed murderer. The narrator is a younger person who has killed an old man and then dismembered and buried the man's body. The two of them (the murderer and their victim) lived in the same house. Neither character is named, and the gender of the narrator is not given.

William Faulkner's story also concerns two people in a house, although the reader is not told for certain that Homer resided in Emily's home. The first-person narrator takes considerable trouble to convince the reader that they are an authoritative source on the events in that house as well as in the town. The narrator is not named, and their gender is not established.

Poe's narrator confesses to the murder, rationalizing their actions by blaming the old man and also blaming him for their need to confess. Two important symbols are the victim's heart—which the narrator insists they heard beating after the old man's death—and his eye, which always looked on the narrator (they could not do the killing until it was closed). The fantastic details of the killing and the dismemberment raise doubts as to whether or not the murder even happened: it all could have happened in the narrator's mind.

Faulkner's narrator tells us a great deal about Emily, who had been very dependent on her tyrannical father. After his death, she apparently suffered a mental decline. The narrator describes her as elderly, overweight, and unattractive. The reader learns that, after her death, the dead body of Homer was found in her home.

The narrator seems convinced that she murdered her former suitor, but this is never proven. He may have died a natural death, or someone else might have killed him; the latter possibility is implied by the fact that the handyman left town immediately upon her death. The most important symbols are the rose—representing faded youth—and the pink of Emily's bedroom, which is also related to this theme.

Ok, here goes:

Point of View: The Tell-Tale Heart is told in first person, which you can identify because the narrator says "I". A Rose For Emily APPEARS to be written in 3rd person, but if you look closely, you will see that the narrator uses words like "our" in the first sentence and "we" and "our" in the paragraph that begins with "That was when people had begun to feel really..." So, this story, too, is told in first person. It is unknown, however, who this narrator is, but one can assume that it is one of the officials or assistants to an official or a police officer as he was one of the people to go into Miss Emily's house and discover the dead bodies.

Characters: The narrator from "Tell-Tale" is a man who is most likely the caregiver of the old man that he kills. He is clearly mentally disturbed which can be garnered from the way that he talks and 'assures' us that he is not insane at all. Miss Emily is not insane initially, but may have been driven to a type of twisted insanity as her life spirals downward. Both characters are murderers, however, Miss Emily's crime is one which she committs through careful thought and planning--she buys poison. And yes, the 'Tell-Tale' narrator carefully executes his plan, but does so based on urges and whims that he cannot control.

The protagonists of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "A Rose for Emily" (the unnamed narrator and Emily Grierson, respectively) both commit a murder because they are overwhelmed by some significant fear. The narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" seems to fear mortality, as indicated by the symbolism he associates with midnight (the "death" of day) and his description of the sound he believes to be the old man's heartbeat (which he says sounds like a watch enveloped in cotton: a ticking clock is a common symbol of mortality, connoting the idea that our "time" is running out). He admits that the "groan of mortal terror" the old man utters reminds him of his own, similar groans. He lives in mortal terror, and this is why he associates the heartbeat (really his own, pumping fast with adrenaline) with time as well. He fears death, and the old man's "vulture eye" is a reminder of it: vultures are associated with death, as are the old man's apparent age and probable cataracts. Therefore, he must get rid of the old man.

Emily, on the other hand, fears being alone and abandoned. After her own father drove away her suitors, she at least had him. Then he died, a fact she could not accept for at least several days. She murders Homer Barron because he would have left her eventually; as he said, he is not "the marrying kind." Rather than be abandoned again and face the humiliation of being alone and friendless in the world, Emily kills Homer in order to keep him.

Neither character is mentally healthy, but both of them murder out of fear, not because they are malicious or greedy. Their fear seems to consume them and utterly cloud their judgment, leading them to commit deeds they might not otherwise have done.

Miss Emily Grierson and the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" are both mentally ill individuals who commit murders and do not have a firm grasp on reality. Emily Grierson is a tragic character; she suffered from her father's oppressive influence as an adolescent and was not allowed to date as a young woman. Emily does not acknowledge her father's death, ends up murdering Homer Barron, and refuses to recognize the passage of time. Similarly, the narrator in Poe's classic short story also suffers from a mental illness and mentions that he can hear "all things in the heaven and in the earth." He also ends up committing a murder, killing the old man in the middle of the night, and struggles with the concept of time.

Despite several similarities, the protagonists of both works have many differences. Emily Grierson hails from an aristocratic home, is well known throughout the town of Jefferson, and symbolically represents the Old South. Emily Grierson does not narrate the story and is viewed as a tragic character. In contrast, the unreliable narrator of Poe's short story attempts to convince the reader that he is sane by recounting how he murdered the old man, but he is nonetheless perceived as insane by the reader. The reader has a better understanding of what is taking place in the protagonist's mind in Poe's short story, and they are less sympathetic to his struggles than they are to Miss Emily's mental issues.

As this question refers to two different works of literature, I will leave it in the Literature Group.

This is a very interesting question. I think I would be tempted to approach it from discussing the reliability of the two characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," we are clearly presented with an unreliable narrator, who, in spite of his protestations, clearly shows himself to be on the edge of lunacy if not completely mad. You will want to consider his obsession with the old man's eye and how the sound of the old man's heart drives him into a frenzy.

With Miss Emily, on the other hand, you will want to think about how she doesn't live in the same reality as the rest of the neighbourhood. Think of how she doesn't initially accept the death of her father and then what we discover at the end about her "affair" with Barron. Certainly the boundary line between dead and alive doesn't seem to exist from her perspective - she is unreliable in the same way.

Hope this gives you some ideas to work on - certainly unreliability of the narrators seems to be key in this question.