William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

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Typically in literature the way the story is told reveals how the readers are supposed to see our characters in correlation with the actions of the characters themselves. This technique is used to produce foreshadowing, insight and dramatic irony. In the short story, A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner employs the voices of many narrators blended together to warp the use of time, form, and perception of a traditional short story. By viewing the story in anonymous first person plural style the form of narration, of keeping the narrator nameless and undefined, successfully keeps the reader clueless and suspicious that nothing we are hearing about Miss Emily’s life is one hundred percent accurate. The town acts as the narrator and tells the story…show more content…
Faulkner uses the town so that empathy towards Miss Emily can remain unspoiled; imagine what a different story it would be if Miss Emily told it, all mystery and compassion for her would be lost. The reader would either be hidden from the truth indefinitely just as Miss Emily hides from everyone, or the truth would be so unnerving that we would have no sympathy for her, but with the objective narrator these horrific incidents are only hinted at and happen out of our narrators knowledge. In the end of the story when Miss Emily is dead the town finally can gratify a curiosity insatiable for fifty or sixty years, they open the sealed door but only after she is in the ground (Sullivan 164). This could be partially because of guilt the town has of seeing and speculating, to the point that they are “peeping toms refusing her privacy” (Sullivan 164) but never doing anything to assist her. When they find Homer Barron dead in her attic it is a shock, especially when the previous foreshadowing of this event finally fit together. The reader then is treated just like the townspeople learning of this “gruesome perversion [,] but whose perversion” (Sullivan 164) is it? It becomes apparent that it is the townspeople who invade Miss Emily’s privacy, Miss Emily herself for the murder and insinuated necrophilia of her lover and also the…show more content…
This allows Faulkner to use manipulation of time in flashbacks as the main format in which this story is told. Many indications lead us to understand that it was written in modernist America a couple decades after the civil war because of the “noted… conflicts in the story between the past and the present, the South and the North, the old and the new, the traditional and the traditionalists, and the gentility and the middle-lower class” (Watkins 508). The prominent use of contradictions are used in describing Miss Emily and her life through imagery comparisons such as Miss Emily and her house which are both stubborn in nature and intended to be fancy but rundown in a swamp(FIND). Equally important to the manipulation of time is how Faulkner “divide[s] the story into five parts and based [the separations] on incidents of isolation and intrusion” (Sullivan 163) . The contrast between Miss Emily and her home by the townspeople and her surroundings are carried out by the invasions of the house by the newer generation in town who have less respect for Miss Emily (Sullivan 163). Despite this “the exact chronology is actually of little interest of relevance and may indeed be irrecoverable” (Skinner 44) as the events have more to do with the order they are
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