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A Rose For Emily Outside Perspective

448 Words2 Pages

If you knew someone who started to act differently and started to seem out of place and grimey, how would you view them? In the story A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner chose to reveal Emily’s life by giving the reader an outside perspective on how others would see her life, which makes the reader perceive Emily as this lonely, disgusting person, but she's actually very broken-hearted. The perspective of her neighbors viewing Miss Emily showed how she became lonely. Miss Emily’s father was a big deal in the town and it was very hard on her when he passed away. When Faulkner talks about Emily’s father and her sweetheart, the narrator says, “After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her …show more content…

Eventually, Miss Emily’s house started to give off a horrible scent that her neighbors could smell. The perspective of the deputation that went to her house shows how she could have viewed Emily as grimey. When a deputation went to her house and an old man admitted to them, the narrator says, “It smelled of dust and disuse — a close, bitter smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished with heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motions in the single sun-ray” (Faulkner 352). Miss Emily’s house was dirty and filled with dust, revealing that she doesn’t clean. The scent that her house has shows that she doesn’t care about it. The state that Miss Emily’s house is in shows that the deputation could view her as dirty and grimey. Emily doesn’t clean her house because of Homer, who she loves dearly. She’s so sad that he passed away that she doesn’t do anything. William Faulkner likely made the decision to reveal the events in Emily’s life in this way to make the reader have a specific perspective at the beginning of the story and have it be totally different at the

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