A Rose For Emily Narrative Analysis

In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner depicts the series of events and circumstances surrounding a reclusive woman in a small Mississippi town. The woman, Emily Grierson, is portrayed as eccentric by everyone in the town for her strange behavior. Faulkner uses a distinct narrative style throughout his story, using structure and narration to inform the reader’s understanding of the main character, Emily. Faulkner presents the narrative through a unique structure, with the narrator utilizing a series of flashbacks to depict the events of the story. These flashbacks are all chronological except for the first one, the one in which Emily dies. The only scenes included are those of which the town can form an opinion of Miss Emily. “We did not say she was crazy then” (Faulkner). The narrator tells the story as if a group of people sat around gossiping in a small town. The town gossips because they are nosy and curious, Emily kept to herself and did not come out of her house much.
“WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years” (Faulkner).

The audience tends to ask what happens to Homer Barron. After Emily’s death, everyone in the town assumes that Emily bought the arsenic to poison Homer. In Jim Barloon’s article on “A Rose for Homer,” he states that many people have questioned if “Homer Barron, Emily Grierson 's suitor in Faulkner 's "A Rose for Emily," is gay” (Barloon). Homer says himself that “he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks ' Club--that he was not a marrying man” (Faulkner). No one will ever know why Miss Emily killed Homer Barron, but by him saying this, the audience thinks that Emily killed him because she wanted to be with him, but maybe Homer just wasn’t