A rose for Emily

Modern literature abandons formal traditional ideals, without showing any liniar
sequence of events. The reader has to become active, which is a common
attribute in modernist texts. A cronology of A rose for Emily is useful because it
makes the plot more easily comprehensible, and it helps clarify the function of
time in the story. A rose for Emily is a short story that is made up by fragments
that don t respect the cronology being narrated by an anonymous narrator. The
narrator can be associated with a citizen of Jeferson, who has in fact observed
parts f the event and has acquired others gossip, speculations, or legends of the
town.
The narration is devided in five parts and it started and ends with the death of
Miss Emily. The other parts are considered flashbacks about her life. The
technique used by Faulkner is that of stream of consciousness. This ilustrates the
subjectively experienced mind time. The world is expressed as a broken image. A
chronology in a story makes it more easely comprehensible.
Born in an old Mississippi family, William Faulkner made his home in Oxford, seat of the University of
Mississippi. After the fifth grade he went to school only off and on-lived, read, and wrote much as he
pleased. In 1918, refusing to enlist with the "Yankees," he joined the Canadian Air Force, and was
transferred to the British Royal Air Force. After the war he studied a little at the University, did house
painting, worked as a night superintendent at a power plant, went to New Orleans and became a
friend of Sherwood Anderson, then to Europe and back home to Oxford. By this time he had written
two novels. The Sound and the Fury followed in 1929. Financial success came with Sanctuary in
1931, which he assisted in filming. Faulkner 's novels are intense in their character portrayals of
disintegrating Southern aristocrats, poor whites, and African Americans. A complex stream-of-
consciousness rhetoric often involves Faulkner in lengthy sentences of anguished power. Most of his
tales are set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and are characterized by the use of
many recurring characters from families of different social levels spanning more than a century. His
best subjects are the old, dying South and the newer materialistic South. As I Lay Dying (1930), is a
grotesquely tragicomic story about a family of poor southern whites. With Absalom, Absalom! (1936);
the difficult parts of his famous short novel "The Bear" (published in Go Down, Moses, 1942); and the
allegorical A Fable (1954), a non-Yoknapatawpha novel set in France during World War I; Faulkner
returned to an innovative and difficult style that most readers have trouble with. Yet, interspersed
among such works are collections of easily read stories originally published in popular magazines.
There seems to be a growing sentiment among critics that the Snopes trilogy-The Hamlet (1940), The
Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959)-for the most part an example of Faulkner's "moderate" style,
could well be among his most important works. Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for
literature "for his powerful and artistically independent contribution to the new American novel," but it
would appear now that he also deserved to win that honor for his contribution to world literature. When
reporting his death, the Boston Globe quoted Faulkner's having once told an interviewer: "Since man
is mortal, the only immortality for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will
always move. That is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and
irrevocable oblivion through which he must some day pass." In addition to the Nobel Prize, Faulkner
received the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1950, and in 1951 he was
given the National Book Award for his Collected Stories Collected Stories. For his novel A Fable he
received the National Book Award for the second time, as well as the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. The
Reivers (1962) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. In 1957 and 1958, he was the University of
Virginia's first writer-in-residence, and in January 1959 he accepted an appointment as consultant on
contemporary literature to the Alderman Library of that university. Although Faulkner was not without
honors in his lifetime and has received world recognition since then, it is surprising to learn that, when
Malcolm Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner in 1946, he found that almost all of Faulkner's books
were out of print. By arranging selections from the works to form a continuous chronicle, Cowley
deserves much of the credit for making readers aware of the way in which Faulkner was creating a
fictive world on a scale grander than that of any novelist since Balzac. William Faulkner died in Oxford,
Mississippi, in 1962.

-gender or race in the story

-it is observed a community s sense of paste in the imges of death

-the morbid atmosphere of decay prepares the macabre ending

-A rose for Emily has two major charecters: Emily Grierson and the community. They are
complementary rather than antagonistic characters

-Faulkner provides us three dominant images of Emily, each reflecting a different stage: we see Emily
as a young woman in the tableau the community remembers, after her father s death, Emily, over
thirty, her hair cut short, rides around town in Homer Barron s rented yellow-wheeled buggy, and after
the dissapearance of Hommer, she becomes the idol in a niche, the small obese figure

This three images shows Emily s tragic history. Emily s sick attachement for her father, her affair with
Homer Barron, her motivation for murdering her lover, her necrophilia are meaningful in the context of
the community s relation ship with Emily. The narrator refers to the community as we. The entire story
is narrated in the past tense, but present actions occurs after the death of Emily. The story opens with
the announcement of her death. It ends with the town s examination, after her burial, with that room
that we knew no one had seen in forty years. Berween the opening paragraph and the short closing
scene, the narrator presents historical data about Emily and the town, focusing on various episodes
covering some fifty yars of Emily s seventy four years, without regard to chronology. The narrator
moves from scenes to scenes by association of thought.

-Miss Emily, however, is only a symbol of the community s sense of hereditary obligation.

The eighthy-year old Judge Stevens is mayor when complaints about the smell from the Grierson
house begin to come in. The meeting of the board of alderman which consists of three grey beards
and one younger man, a member of the rising generation. This younger man insist that all they need to
do is to clean up her place. Emily s values are those of her father, and she is bound of them by the
power of filial love. About thirty, when her father dies, Emily refuses, for three days, to acknowledge
that he is dead. Emily s affair with Homer Barron had been a futile attempt to escape the power of the
past and enter time. Homer Barron is everything that Mr. Grierson would have disdained. A laborer, the
foreman of a gang of black street worker, Homer is an Yankee, the enemy of the old South, who has
come to town because the community is moving to the modern world and paving its sidewalks.

Homer, obviously cooperating with Emily in an effort toget rid of the cousins, leaves town for eight
days. Within a week of his departure the cousins leave, and three days later, Homer returns, enters
Emily s house, and that is the last the town sees of him. The details are important if we are to
understand why Emily kills her lover. But the detailed description of the bridal tomb that Faulkner
provides at the end of the story gives no indication whatever of any of quarrel or tension.

At peace mow that she stopped time and can live quietly with the dead, Emily grows obese. As she
retreats further into the world of dead, Emily becomes the imbodiment of the past