William Faulkner’s a Rose for Emily 2

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, the narrative voice is a detached witness to the events in Miss Emily’s life. This is portrayed through its limited omniscience, its shifting viewpoint, and its unreliability. The narrators’ limited omniscience is seen through their inability to see into the depths of Miss Emily and her personal life; to see her thoughts, feelings, and motives. No one knows the reason she cuts her hair, all that happens between her and Homer, and why she locks herself in her house for such a long time. The narrators also show limited omniscience because the crucial events and people in Miss Emily’s life are unknown, like Homer, her manservant, her father’s death, and even her own sickness and death. After she is found to be dead, the narrators admit “We did not even know she was sick; we had long given up trying to get any information from the Negro. He had talked to no one probably not even to her” (William Faulkner 52). Yet, though the voice is limited, it does have an omniscient quality to it. Although the narrators don’t know that Miss Emily has been sick, they describe the detailed setting of her death; “She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped up on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight” (para 53). The narrators are also not bound by time or place; they follow Emily throughout her life and know of conversations and events, even those in which they were obviously not present. This shows through the history lessons of the town throughout generations and the detailed conversations between: the townspeople and the Mayor, Emily and the pharmacist, and many more. The unreliability of the narrators is seen throughout this short story because they obviously have no personal relationship with Emily or anyone crucial in Emily’s life. They take on an outsider’s perspective and can mislead the audience at times. When Emily buys the arsenic from the pharmacy, the whole town thinks that she will kill herself (para 43), never leading readers to believe that the arsenic is for Homer Barron (a conclusion readers must assume at the very end). The narrators are unreliable because they underestimate Miss Emily’s strength, always being surprised when in hard times “she carried her head high enough- even when we believed that she was fallen” (para 33). In this town, Miss Emily is sometimes dehumanized and sometimes humanized by the narrators, showing still their unreliability. In the beginning, they see her as an aspect of the town saying “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, a care” (para 3) and later in the story, “At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized” (para 26). Lastly, the narrator has shifting viewpoints. The “they” perspective changes to “we” at times and “the town” to “our town”. After Miss Emily dies, the narrators say “they waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it” (para 56). But in the following paragraphs after they enter her attic, the scene is described as, “we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin” (para 59). This shifting perspective makes readers question who is really telling the story, especially when at other times, the story is told from an indirect “he said” and “she said” gossip perspective. The narrators also having shifting viewpoints in their changing attitude towards Miss Emily from pity, to gladness, to frustration. At one moment when they think she is married to Homer, they say “we were really glad” (para 45); another moment they are disappointed when he doesn’t blow her off in public (para 47). This detached witnessing of the events in the life of Miss Emily shows that the narrators have limited omniscience, are unreliable, and have shifting viewpoints.

Works Cited
Faulkner, William “A Rose For Emily.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.
Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. 3rd Compact ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2006. 4-11

Cited: Faulkner, William “A Rose For Emily.” Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. 3rd Compact ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2006. 4-11