A Rose For Emily Isolation Essay

William Faulkner had written one of the most complex and interesting characters in his short story, “A Rose for Emily.” The character, Emily Grierson, committed a murder at the end of the story. Faulkner used the characters, the plot, and the theme of isolation as clues for Emily’s intentions behind the murder. First, Faulkner used character to highlight Emily’s motivation for murder. He described Emily Grierson to be a weird and peculiar woman with some kind mental health issue. Her father helped build the foundation for her characteristics. Whenever her father was still alive, he would chase out all the potential suitors that were not compatible enough for Emily. Soon, his death would cause Emily to be single and unmarried, having her

Faulkner drafted the story into five sections, with different flashbacks that are not sequential. “The narrator begins the story by describing the scene of Emily’s funeral; this description, however, is actually a flashback because the story ends with narrator’s memory of the town’s discovery of the corpse in the Grierson home after Emily’s funeral” (T. Akers). Whenever Emily’s father passed away, Emily was in denial and refusing the part that her father was dead. The town of Jefferson had to convince her for three days to give up her father’s corpse. This one scene would come to foreshadow the same circumstance at the end of the story. During the story, the townspeople never saw Barron again, knowing that his last location was at Emily’s house. Knowing that Barron was going to leave her, Emily poisoned him with the arsenic that she bought from the druggist in an earlier flashback. Being in the same situation as her father, Emily did not tell the townspeople about Barron’s corpse and kept it in her house for decades. It was until the end, after Emily’s funeral, the townspeople found a corpse on her bed along with a strand of gray hair. Faulkner made clever use of the flashbacks to foreshadow the clues and hints that would become an important part of the

Throughout the story, Faulkner constantly displayed how Emily isolated herself from the town of Jefferson, with a couple of exceptions of going out with Barron and shopping for arsenic and men clothing. Although Emily is distant from Jefferson, she somehow became the talk of the townspeople. Her father was the only close relationship that Emily had because he would not let anyone date her. Since her father died and left her all by herself, she had trouble accepting his death and letting go of his body. Now that Emily has fallen in love with Barron, she does not want to let go of him. “Emily takes the offensive by poisoning Homer so he can’t abandon her. The discovery of a strand of her hair on the pillow next to the rotting corpse suggests that she slept with the cadaver or, even worse, had sex with it. Emily’s repressive life therefore contributes to her (rather severe) psychological abnormality: necrophilia” (D. Akers). Her loneliness must have been the start of her abnormal behavior and motivation of