A Rose for Emily Blog

In the story A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner the narrator is Emily’s neighbors. I can tell this by how the narrator always says “we” and how they say “our whole town” (206). This influences the development of the story because the neighbors narrate in the present of what they are witnessing, and they flashback to what happened in Emily’s life that caused what they are witnessing to occur. It also influences the tone of the story. Since they are narrating they make Emily seem rather crazy and harsh. Where if Emily was narrating she probably wouldn’t make herself appear crazy or harsh. An example of this would be in the story when she was trying to get the arsenic from the pharmacist and the text reads “Is…arsenic? Yes ma’am. But you want--” “I want arsenic.” “The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag.”(209). Another example of this is when her father died and when people would come to see her she would tell them that her father wasn’t dead. In the story Emily killed Homer using arsenic and then put his body in the upstairs bed in a room filled with men things. Emily falls in love with Homer and he’s her last chance at getting married because of her age. Now that her father had died she would be able to marry him. The only problem is that Homer didn’t feel the same way and an example of this in the text was “Homer himself had remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club—that he was not a marrying man”.(210). After killing Homer she would lay next to him in the bed he lay in. It is almost like she was living a married fantasy in that upstairs room with the dead Homer as her husband. She wanted to marry him but since he was going to leave her she had to kill him so she could be with him forever.