Plot 2. How I Met My Husband

"So I said yes, and I went out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him, and we were engaged a year more while I got my things together, and then we did marry." pg. 146

I was very surprised by the way the story ended. I found it very ironic that the title is "How I Met My Husband," yet she describes him and their encounter in two paragraphs. I know that Edie's desire to receive a letter from her former lover, Chris Watters, was the reason she met her husband, but I thought the excessive detail of their meaningless fling was irrelevant to her meeting her husband.  The structure of the story provided suspense for the reader. I didn't know what was going to happen. I certainly didn't predict that she would meet and marry her husband within the last page. If we had known that Edie wouldn't end up with Chris, I wouldn't have been as engaged in the story. Because the story is told retrospectively, it makes sense that she wouldn't end up with Chris. As a young girl, she  fantasized about her dream husband, Chris. Now, based on Edie's tone, looking back at herself, she sees how foolish and naive she was. She realizes that logically she needs to be with a normal, nice guy, like Carmichael.

Plot 1. A Rose for Emily

"One of us lifted something from it, and leaned forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair." pg. 289

The purpose of the structure of this story is to create suspense. If this had simply been told in chronological order, the suspense wouldn't have been as effective. To begin the story, Emily is depicted as a victim. She was hassled by the police and imprisoned by her father. So as a reader, I am thinking to myself, poor Emily, as do the people of her town. But, in the end we discover Emily isn't really so helpless. She is in fact crazy. Ironically, Emily turns out to be the so called villain. She has been storing a dead body in her house and laying with it night after night. I think that Emily's change in physical appearance, from thin and pretty to fat and ugly, alludes to the change in how the reader sees her. When Emily is young and beautiful, no one suspects she could be crazy or harmful, but as she begins to age and let herself go, the suspense of what she did begins to build. It is not until she loses all her beauty and youth that we see the true, insane Emily.