Literary Device: Irony
In “A Rose For Emily” by William Faulkner, it is ironic that Emily ends up murdering Homer because the reader is led to believe that Homer is the only person that Emily was ever capable of loving deeply and then at the end they discover that Emily did not love him at all and murdered him (Faulkner, 88). The reader is able to put the events of the story into order and they learn the haunting ironic truth. The poison was for killing Homer not for killing rats, and the stench coming from her house was of Homer’s rotting body that lay in her bedroom.
Literary Device: Symbol
In the short story, “Spunk” by Zora Neale Hurston, the black bobcat is a symbol for Joe Kanty. The whole story is about an intense rivalry between Spunk and Joe over a woman named Lena. Lena is married to Joe but Spunk who is a cavalier character takes Lena away from Joe because he wants her and Spunk gets whatever he wants. Joe gets into a fight with Spunk over his wife and Spunk ends up shooting him with a .45 (Hurston, 504). In the days after the murder, Spunk begins to feel strangely haunted by the spirit of Joe. He says that a black bobcat walked right outside of his house and just looked him straight in the eye (Hurston, 504). He knew that the bobcat was Joe coming back to scare him.
Literature of the South 