A Rose For Emily Grierson Character Analysis

Faulkner tells the story of “A Rose for Emily” through a scattered, nonsequential plotline. The contrast between these mismatched events and her twisted perception of the world helps develop a better insight of Emily Grierson’s character which augments the theme that time does not always hold an importance in the way that people think and behave; rather, if a person does not make an effort to change his or her ways, reform should not be expected. The death of Emily Grierson is written out in the very first sentence of the story: "[when] Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral" (1) Furthermore, in the beginning of the story, we are first given hints as the author chooses to allude to the physical and mental state of Emily

Forthwith, the author gives us more intuition on the state of her well-being as "[s]he told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body" (3). Years and years later after the death of Homer Baron and Emily herself, the townspeople learn that Emily had recreated the scene of her father 's death through Homer as they stood "looking down at the profound and fleshless grin," (7) seeing that "[t]he body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him" (7). Through this, we see that Emily does not heal with time. By including the detail that she had been laying with the skeleton, it shows how denial in one part of her life manifests itself into part of another as an inability to adapt to change. She finds the normalization in the twisted events in her life such as the way she confides over the losses in her