A Rose For Emily Literary Analysis Essay

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In, ‘A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner divides the short story into five parts to permit the narrator to reveal what he knows about the life and death of Emily Grierson through a series of flashbacks. This separation and mixture of recurring memories is what makes the reader fall into the trap of feeling both pity, and sympathy, towards, “Poor Emily,” (6) who is a actually just a cynical, stubborn, and lonely character who refuses change throughout her whole life. Emily who was,” a tradition,” “a duty,” “a care,” and “an obligation,” (1) to the town is a woman that has no desire to participate in the emerging modernity that is coming to the south, and because of this is stuck in a timeframe of denial, while literally being trapped in a town that has conformed to the change surrounding it (1). While wishing to…show more content…
Emily is discovered to be a cold-blooded killer that disregards the laws of the present, and refuses to acknowledge that the world around her is changing, by continuously trying to stop time, which the narrator remembers her literally, “with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt,” that hid what they could hear, “[as an] invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain,” (2). The thoughtless ways that Emily uses her loneliness and stubbornness is not what makes her a villain, but rather the advantages she makes of her current situation that do so. Emily’s misunderstood character reveals just how disturbed she is when she attempts to fuse life with death, first with her father’s death, and second with Homer’s death. Nevertheless in, “A Rose for Emily,” death ultimately triumphs over life and Emily’s infamous legacy continues to be told, not as the villain they wanted, but as the villain they needed to uphold the glory days of the old decrepit
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