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The Motive
What is the most important question? Who, what, when, where? How about why? Why is
the most important question to ask for anything and everything. Why does someone have the
motivation to kill another person? The answer to that question can be a life story of abuse and
torture. Or it can be a simple one word response: revenge. Revenge is when someone takes
matters into their own hands and decides the fate of another. In the case of Matt Fowler, the
protagonist in “Killings”, a short story by Andre Dubus, he was looking for revenge of his
murdered son. However, this was not the case of Miss Emily Grierson, the protagonist in “A
Rose for Emily”, a short story by William Faulkner. Both stories have a non-linear plot that helps
the reader understand the motive from the beginning. Even though both stories’s protagonists are
murderer, they have different motivations.
The motive for “Killings” is revenge. Dubus’s story begins in the middle of the whole
story. Frank Fowler has just been buried in the ground after being shot by a jealous husband,
which the read only finds out later, and his father is walking away with his family. The other son
kept saying, “I could kill him” (Dubus). This is foreshadowing an event in which Frank’s killer is
murdered. However the story continues to reveal what happened to Frank before he was killed. It
starts again in the past, leading up to Frank’s murder. Richard, Frank’s murderer, beat Frank one
night. His eye was swollen and bruised and he could not smile because he had a fat lip. Matt told
Frank to press charges, but Frank said no. Both was concerned Richard could do it again, but still
Frank did not press charges. Frank did nothing to prevent Richard from coming back to the house
to cause him pain again. Frank’s mercy did not help him in the slightest way. Richard murdered
Frank one night; he shot him in Mary Anne’s (Richard’s ex-wife and Frank’s girlfriend) home, in
front of her sons. From that point on, the story continues on in the present. After Frank was
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killed, his mother, Ruth, almost suffered the most. “She can’t even go out for aspirin and
cigarettes. It’s killing her” (Dubus 108). If his mother went out to run an errand, it seemed as
though fate would have it that Richard would choose the same time and place as Ruth. Matt did
not want anyone in his family to suffer anymore pain, so he planned his revenge against Richard.
Matt’s motive was revenge and closure. He wishes to avenge his son’s death and put an end to his
wife’s suffering from seeing Richard walk around town, a free man.
In another short story, “A Rose for Emily”, again, it starts in the middle of a story. The
opening paragraph explains that Emily Grierson has died and they are preparing her for her
funeral. Throughout the story, several minor characters complain that “a snake or a rat [was]
killed in the yard” (Faulkner 631). The characters nor the reader know what is causing the awful
