of his community (more on that in point 2).

"A Rose for Emily" is narrated by a communal narrator who speaks for the whole town. The narration is built mostly on gossip and rumors. Since Emily was such a recluse, the narrator, and thus the reader, is not totally sure what is true and what is invention. The chronology of the story is also unconventional. We know Emily died at the start of the story, but we then go back to earlier parts of her life and learn about her relationships with her father and with Homer Barron, whom she apparently hoped to marry. The narrative voice and the order in which they narrate the story creates suspense and keeps the reader questioning what is going on.

2. Isolation: As I mentioned, when Brown returns to town, he mistrusts everyone around him. Mistrust leads him to isolate himself from his family and community. He leads a miserable life and makes no connections with anyone around him, even his immediate family.

Emily Grierson also isolates herself, at first because of her father and their superiority complex. Their family was once rich and powerful in the town. Emily's father seemed to hold impossible standards for her husband. She is exceedingly lonely, and when her only real companion, her father, dies, she is in utter denial. After this, she isolates herself in her home until she tries to form a relationship with Homer. It is assumed that Homer is a gay man and will leave her, so she poisons him and keeps his body in her house. This act shows how desperately lonely she is.

3. Gothic style and anxieties: As another reviewer mentioned, both stories have Gothic style elements, which reveal anxieties of the characters or collective fears of the times in which they are living.

"Young Goodman Brown" is set during the colonial period in New England in a Puritan community. There were so many uncertainties for the new colonists that nearly everything was to be feared. This anxiety about surviving in an unknown world may be reflected in the dark woods segment of the story. The psychological horror that you can never truly know other people, even those closest to you or who seem morally upright, is a chilling thought.

"A Rose for Emily" features a corpse in a woman's bed for over ten years, maybe for decades. This is truly a Southern Gothic story. The Southern element comes in when we consider that the Grierson family were powerful before the Civil War but lost their position and money after it. Faulkner's choice to make Emily hang on to this dead body for all this time symbolizes the Old South's desperation to hang on to the past, a time when they flourished rather than struggled. Then, on a more personal level, Emily's anxiety about being left alone is central to the story.

To compare these two short stories, it is necessary to analyze the ways in which they are similar. Since the stories take place in different settings and one is told in first-person while the other is third-person, the similarities are found in characterization and theme.

Goodman Brown and Emily Grierson are similar in that they are ultimately outcasts in their societies. It is arguable that each makes the choice not to conform and lives with the consequences. Young Goodman Brown decides that he must test his faith because he cannot merely accept the teachings within his Puritan colony. The outcome of his evening in the forest makes him question the Christianity of almost everyone in his village. He becomes distrustful and rejects the people of faith who surround him. He withdraws from the community. Emily Grierson's situation is slightly different; she refuses to change with the times. Because she resolutely remains stuck in the past, she, too withdraws from the society of her community. In this way, both characters choose to become outcasts.

A final way that the stories are similar, though they were written one hundred years apart, is that they both contain gothic elements. Goodman Brown encounters, whether in a dream or in reality, the devil. Emily Grierson commits a murder and then sleeps beside the corpse. These dark, horrific elements are associated with the gothic genre.

Both Emily Grierson and Goodman Brown have fraught relationships with their significant others. Initially, Emily's father prevents her from marrying any of the suitors that come calling: he does not feel that any are good enough for her. He then dies, leaving her completely alone and desperate for some kind of companionship. Soon, she takes a new beau, Homer Barron, a Yankee construction foreman of whom her father would never have approved. Rather than allow him to leave her as so many others have done, Emily murders him and keeps his decaying body as her bedfellow for several decades.

Goodman Brown, rather than being the partner who fears abandonment, is actually the partner who does the abandoning. At the beginning of his story, he leaves his wife, Faith, behind him to go into the woods on some sinful errand, even though she is fearful and concerned. He makes a plan to return the next day, ready to recommit himself to God and to "cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven." Alas, he never can return to his former life. After witnessing a witches' Sabbath in the woods, an unholy event attended by all the seemingly pious people in the town—including Faith—he returns a changed man, one who has lost his faith in both God and humanity.

Both Brown and Emily Grierson end up as deeply cynical and unhappy people. Emily endures terrible solitude, and Brown does also. Despite being surrounded by people, he can trust none of them. Neither character is capable of trust.