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... tion, but that by keeping herself isolated and refusing to marry Homer Barron because of the sense of "noblesse oblige" that her father had ingrained into her, she had in her life been a sterling tribute to her father. Thus, both Faulkner and Tolstoy, though not dwelling on the point are acknowledging the powerful roles the parents had in the lives of Ivan and Emily, and ultimately, their deaths. Moreover, both stories dwell on the theme of a person's isolation from society. In A Rose For Emily, Emily physically separates herself from the rest of the world and resigns to the decrepit house where she died, while Ivan, though he remained at home near to his family while on his deathbed, had immersed himself in the "black hole" (Section XII: "He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still to his not being able to get right into it), imprisoned himself in a "black border" (section I) that separated him from everyone around him. Furthermore, both Faulkner and Tolstoy explore the protagonists desire to live their lives by proxy, as it were.
In Ivan's case he fulfils the role that a fine young man in society is expected to - from his playing vint with his comrades, to his marriage to Praskovya. (Section II: " To say that Ivan Illych married because he fell in love with Praskovya Fedorovna and found that she sympathized with his views of life would be as incorrect to say that he married because his social circle approved of the match. ) Similarly, Emily, though in love with Barron, refuses to marry him because of the noble family reputation that she believes it is her duty to uphold. Instead, she (carried her head high enough) does what her cousins tell is the correct thing to do and she believes her father would have expected. To go a step further, both stores take the same pessimistic view of love as a source of anguish and marriage as a source of despair. Ivan all too often proclaims - if only to himself - his ever increasing hate for Praskovya.
From the very beginning he "might have been inspired to a more brilliant match (Section II) " and later on we are told that "Matrimony - at any rate with Praskovya Fedorovna -... often infringed both comfort and propriety. " Faulkner takes only a slightly different stand, in that although we are given no reason to believe that there was anything but genuine love between Emily and Homer, it is this love that becomes the proximate cause of Homer's death, almost as if both authors are suggesting that love is really only an ideal that is unattainable in real life. And finally, perhaps the most significant similarity is Tolstoy's use of a common servant to be the single source of comfort to Ivan during his last days, and Faulkner's use of the Negro who had devoted his entire life to Emily. A minor detail really, but when one considers that while Tolstoy could easily have used any character - Peter Ivanovich? - to fulfil the role of Gerasim in being the person to give solace to Ivan on his deathbed, Tolstoy chose to introduce and use the character of a serf labourer, and that Faulkner chose to use a Negro man instead of any of the other townsfolk, one begins to suspect an ulterior motive behind these actions. Consider also the description of Gerasim (who appears in the story for no more than five pages) that appears in Section VII: "Gerasim...
with a firm light tread, his heavy boots emitting a pleasant smell of tar and fresh winter air... the sleeves of his print shirt tucked up over his strong bare young arms... restraining the joy of life that beamed from his face... " Now compare it to the description of Praskovya that appears in Section II: "She came from a good family and was not bad looking." Consider also the particularly memorable paragraph in Emily in which Faulkner writes "And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadow, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick, we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse, It is almost as if Tolstoy and Faulkner are pointing out to us as loudly as they could that there is something here we should be seeing.
But, what is it? Why do so many similarities exist between these two short stories, from authors born into different social structures, in different countries during different eras? Certainly one might argue that it makes sense that both Tolstoy and Faulkner would chose to give us some bit of information about the childhoods / early lives of our two characters, if only to give use a sense of realism and to avoid having the characters exist for but the few minutes that the story lasts. It might even be argued that the actions of every man and woman are in some way affected by the events of his or her childhood, so that in referring to how much Ivan and Emily became like their parents, Tolstoy and Faulkner are just reiterating a well-known fact. But what about Gerasim and the Negro man? Indeed Tolstoy and Faulkner are telling us that there is something to be learnt here.
There is no doubt that Ivan and Emily are two very unique stories. Yet, when juxtaposed an interesting image is formed. In one story, we are presented with a woman who never really had control of her life and, left alone, retreated into bleak isolation, dying lonely and unhappy. The other is that of a man whose life was controlled by the decrees of society, who retreated into a mental black hole, but seeing the beauty of life in the common servant assigned to take care of him in his final days dies, if not with a sense of inner peace, without a heavy heart. I believe that Faulkner and Tolstoy, each in his unique way is trying to impart to us a two-fold lesson. The first part is advice that we should live our own lives, not according to the dictations of anyone, but to the best of our abilities; and the second part, a warning that to live alone is to not have lived at all.
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