Explaining "A Rose For Emily"

 I cannot recall when I read William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily.” Dinosaurs may well have been roaming the earth, it that long ago. I suspect this is his best known story. The only other one I can recall reading was “The Bear.”

Interesting Literature published Key Themes of ‘A Rose for Emily’ Explained, and I had to read this since I thought the themes were pretty well obvious.

For example death:

he death of the title character is obviously a central event in the story. The very first words of the story are ‘When Miss Emily Grierson died’, and the story returns to her death, and what is discovered in the wake of it (a dead body), at the end of the narrative. In between, the narrator tells us about the incidents in Emily’s life and the responses of the townspeople, but death ‘bookends’ the story.

Miss Emily’s death symbolises the death of something greater: the death of the Old South, of which she is one of the few surviving members. When she dies, another part of an old world dies with her. She was already something of a living fossil, as it were: her house was the only house on the street not to have been demolished to make way for those garages and cotton gins, while she had treated the house as a kind of living tomb for herself for the last few decades of her life, never leaving it and seldom even being seen.

The death of the Old South is not an uncommon theme for Faulkner. As is the fact of change.

But love is not what I think of when I think of Faulkner, and this is a story of a love. It may also bring into question Faulkner's thinking on love:

Certainly, her actions after his death – which are foreshadowed by her determination to hang on to the dead body of her father when he died – suggest that she killed him out of a perverse kind of love: she keeps his body in the bed, a grim perversion of the marital bed they never shared, and the indentation on the pillow next to his reveals that she has been lying, and perhaps even sleeping, next to his corpse.

It seems to me “A Rose for Emily" is for anyone who thinks they will not like Faulkner (thinking of you T2), or who thinks him too highfaluting for them (most of the rest of you). The story also strikes me as a foreshadowing of Toni Morrison's Beloved.

sch 2/2 

Interesting Literature continued its examination of  “A Rose For Emily” with The Narrator and Narration of ‘A Rose for Emily’ Explained 

The narrator of ‘A Rose for Emily’ is unusual in that ‘they’ use the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ to describe themselves. They are not a character in the story as such (that is to say, they are heterodiegetic rather than homodiegetic, to use the narratologist Gerard Genette’s terms).

Moreover, they are different from a traditional first-person narrator who uses ‘I’ and ‘me’ in reference to themselves; but nor are they an omniscient third-person narrator who views the events of the story from a detached position and perspective.

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But the narrator is not the only unusual narrative feature of ‘A Rose for Emily’. There’s also the non-linear way in which that narrator recounts the life of Miss Emily Grierson, the story’s title character.

The story begins and ends with the events surrounding Miss Emily’s death, and in between – in the main portion of the story – the narrator describes some of the most prominent and significant incidents in the life of the story’s title character. Faulkner uses a kind of foreshadowing to hint at the story’s grim denouement.

sch 2/20/23