A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

Introduction of the Story

The topic under discussion, relates to the description of a short story by William Faulkner; “A rose for Emily”. I also include the comparison of the short story to racism and the way it relates to it.

The story is due to the different time jumps not easy to read and understand even more difficult. The narrative perspective is also unusual: Faulkner uses an anonymous first-person narrator who never appears in the first person singular, but only as "we" occurs.

Author Introduction

The 1897 American-born William Faulkner called up into the 20s Falkner. Faulkner broke off his studies in 1915 and joined the Canadian Air Force but did not participate in the First World War. He was known and received the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature. He described in his works, almost always the fictional Yoknapatawpha County Society of Southern Mississippi, which also is Jefferson.

Change in perspective and general a very complicated narrative style make your access is not always easy. Faulkner's short stories, which he subsequently, integrated into novels are sometimes less well known. An exception is A Rose for Emily. He died in 1962 (Rodman, p. 6).

Review of the Story

The title of the story makes clear that the narrator's story as last homage to Emily sees as a rose that he puts her on the coffin. He is by no means an admirer of Emily but has an ambivalent relationship with her. At first, he describes the ornate, old wooden house of Grierson, testifies as the last monument of past glory of the southern states. It is a relic amid the industrialized modernity with their cars and cotton factories. She is a victim of her strict father who makes her the old maid (Woodward, p.18).

When the father dies, she makes the attempt to escape the loneliness. Her lover, the foreman Barron, who builds the first sidewalks in Jefferson, is a representative of modernity. The old ladies gossiping, but Emily made over it - this is something almost heroic. Barron does not keep its promises, and so she kills him, lives in the future in a world of illusion, lies down at night beside the body down to sleep, as if he were her husband alive. This bizarre notion reminds modern readers a little to Hitchcock's "Psycho". There are so sympathetic and unsympathetic traits to Emily (Winchell, p.60).

In Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, the last part is a recognition scene first in Aristotle's sense, i.e. we have a mystery discovered. From the beginning to the end we grow more and more concerned to know the mystery clustered around the main character-Emily. The next question we should ask is: as in Aristotle's definition, the change from ignorance to knowledge will lead to something, what will this change lead to? When we read it for another time, we see there is another sense of recognition on a higher level. Emily's identity as a representative figure of the upper class of the old South and ...