Nobel Speech

“Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” A lot of stories can come out of these “universal truths”. Think of any decent story and you can usually find some kind of universal truth in it. The most common one I have seen would be love. There are many types of love, but the recurrent one in stories or in movies would be romance. Somehow romance seems to have the capability of really capturing the audience.

I can see many of the universal truth themes in Faulkner’s own short story, “A Rose for Emily”. There was the father and daughter love that wasn’t very apparent, but is still there. This love is mixed with some pride because the father thinks that no man is good enough to court his daughter. His love and pride actually hurts Miss Emily Grierson because he stopped her from getting married until a pretty old age. The whole Grierson family is very prideful. They are from a higher social class than the rest of the villagers, so they think they are better than the others. Even after Miss Emily’s father died, and she is left without much money, she still kept her heads up. The last theme that I want to discuss is pity. After Miss Emily’s father died. The villagers secretly felt sorry for her. However, their pity is also mixed with a little bit of joy and pride. They feel good that they can look down on Miss Emily. This is probably because she is from a higher social class, and commoners usually look up to them, so it felt good for the villagers to pity Miss Emily.