In the same way a painter uses shape, color, perspective, and other aspects of visual art to create a painting, a fiction writer uses character, setting, plot, point of view, theme and various kinds of symbolism and language to create artistic effect in fiction. In literature, a symbol is define by Michael Meyer "a person, object, image, word or event that evokes a range of additional meaning beyond and usually more abstract than its literal significance" (2212). William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" are two examples of fiction that utilize symbolism effectively to examine latent ideas present in literature. .
A Rose for Emily is a story of the conflicting values between the past and present south. Emily and the antiquate house symbolize the ideals of the old, pre-industrial, pre-civil war south. The first paragraph refers to Emily as a "fallen monument", a monument of southern gentility before the Civil War now decease (Faulkner 75). Her house once a magnificent building in town, now "lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps - an eyesore among eyesores" create a juxtaposition of the past and present (75). .
Discrimination is a theme that has symbolic references in A Rose for Emily. After the Civil War, Jefferson still perpetuates the values of classism and racism. The narrator describes Miss Emily as "a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town" convey a hierarchical society (75). A symbol of racism is Colonel Sartoris, whose edict is "that no Negro woman should appear on the street without an apron" (75). Upon the arrival of Homer Barron, the town sees "a Yankee - a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face" suggests he is part African American or simply different from them (78). The town's apathy towards Tobe, further concludes their prejudice.