The Importance of Unimportant Characters- a Indepth View of "A Rose for Emily" and "Flight Patterns"

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Dylan S. McLeod Mr. Hartman ENG 113/LN1 13 June 2012 The Importance of Unimportant Characters Characters are without a doubt one of the most important parts of a story, because they are the story. But there are two different types of characters. You have the obvious Main Characters which are the center of every story, but then there are the unimportant, or better yet background characters. The ones you see, but don’t hear, but actually have just as much an impact, if not sometimes more, on the story as the main character. Like in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, and Sherman Alexie’s “Flight Patterns.” Both stories have very strong main characters, yet each story uses these characters differently. Faulkner gives us Emily, but shrouds her in mystery, to the point that she is almost a bystander in here own story and tells the story from the villagers. Whereas Alexie’s character is completely revealed to us with in the first few paragraphs, but goes along to tell another man’s story. The two main characters are Emily, from “A Rose for Emily” and William from “Flight Patterns.” As much as we don’t know about Emily, we know about William. In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner presents us with a main character that is identified as having a good life for the time period, if not a sheltered one. And then that’s all he reveals to us. The only other characters that are named are Emily’s father, the servant, and Homer Barron. Every other character is just labeled as “the townspeople. The story is laid out so that we only know what the townspeople tell us. The story comes to its climax when Homer Barron is introduced, providing Emily to be the woman her father never let her be, but also fueling the gossip all around the town to a point Emily got scared Homer would leave, so she killed him. In “Flight Patterns” the main character, William, is a healthy, highly

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