The extraordinary degree to which the young Faulkner managed to compress into this, his first published story, many of the elements that came to be characteristic of his fiction is the effect of his unusual use of the first-person point of view and his control of the motifs that flow from it.

By confining himself to the pronoun we, the narrator gives the reader the impression that the whole town is bearing witness to the behavior of a heroine, about whom they have ambivalent attitudes, ambiguously expressed. The ambiguity derives in part from the community’s lack of access to facts, stimulating the narrator to draw on his own and the communal imagination to fill out the picture, creating a collage of images. The narration gives the impression of coming out of a communal consciousness, creating the effect of a peculiar omniscience. An entire novel could be developed from the material compressed into this short story.

Is the narrator telling the story in the Southern oral tradition or is he or she writing it? To ask basic questions about this unusual collective mode of narration—who, what, where, when, and why—is to stir up many possibilities. The oral mode seems most appropriate, but the style, consisting of such phrases as “diffident deprecation,” suggests the written mode.

A pattern of motifs that interact, contrasting with or paralleling one another, sometimes symbolically, sometimes ironically, flows naturally from the reservoir of communal elements in the narrator’s saturated consciousness as he tells the story: the funeral, the cemetery, the garages, cars, cotton gins, taxes, the law, the market basket and other elements of Black existence, the house, its front and back doors, its cellar and upper rooms, the window where Emily sits, the idol image that becomes a fallen monument, images that evoke the Civil War, images of gold and decay, the color yellow, dust, shadows, corpses and bodies like corpses, the smells, the breaking down of doors, the poison, and the images of hair.

To lend greater impact to the surprise ending and to achieve greater artistic unity and intensity of effect, Faulkner uses other devices: foreshadowing, reversal, and repetition. Most of the motifs, spaced effectively throughout, are repeated at least three times, enabling the reader to respond at any given point to all the elements simultaneously.

Imitators of the surprise-ending device, made famous in modern times by O. Henry, have given that device a bad name by using it mechanically to provoke a superficial thrill. In raising the surprise-ending device to the level of complex art, Faulkner achieves a double impact: “The man himself lay on the bed” is shock enough, justified by what has gone before, but “the long strand of iron-gray hair,” the charged image that ends the story, shocks the reader into a sudden, intuitive reexperiencing and reappraisal of the stream of images, bringing order and meaning to the pattern of motifs.

Miss Emily met Homer Barron, a foreman with a construction company, when her hometown was first getting paved streets. Her father had already died, but not before driving away her eligible suitors. As rumors circulated about her possible marriage to a Yankee, Homer left town abruptly. During his absence, Miss Emily bought rat poison.

When Homer returned, the townspeople saw him enter Miss Emily’s house but not leave. Only when she dies do the townspeople discover his corpse on a bed in her house and, next to it, a strand of Miss Emily’s hair.

This gothic plot makes serious points about woman’s place in society. Throughout the story, the reader is aware that these events were taking place during a time of transition: the town was finally getting sidewalks and mailboxes. More importantly, values were changing. The older magistrates, for example, looked on Miss Emily paternally and refused to collect taxes from her; the newer ones tried, unsuccessfully, to do so.

Caught in these changing times, Miss Emily was trapped in her role as a genteel spinster. Without a husband, her life would have no meaning. She tried to give lessons in painting china but could not find pupils for this out-of-date hobby and finally discontinued them. If Homer was thinking of abandoning her, as his departure implied, one can understand her desire to clutch at any sort of union, even a marriage in death.

The theme is developed through an exceptionally well-crafted story. Told from a third-person plural point of view, it reveals the reactions of the town to Miss Emily. As this “we” narrator shifts allegiance—now criticizing Miss Emily, now sympathizing with her—the reader sees the trap in which she was caught. The extensive but unobtrusive foreshadowing prepares the reader for the story’s final revelation without detracting from its force.

Flashback and Foreshadowing

Flashback and foreshadowing are two commonly employed literary devices that manipulate time to achieve specific effects. Flashbacks present events that occurred prior to the story's beginning, while foreshadowing sets up expectations for events that have yet to unfold. Faulkner skillfully incorporates both techniques in ‘‘A Rose for Emily.’’ The narrative is delivered through a series of non-linear flashbacks.

The narrator starts by describing Emily’s funeral scene, which is actually a flashback, as the story concludes with the town’s discovery of a corpse in the Grierson home after Emily's funeral. Throughout the tale, the narrator jumps back and forth between various events in the lives of Emily Grierson and the town of Jefferson. Each narrative segment triggers another, irrespective of chronological order. For instance, the narrator recalls Emily’s funeral, which leads to a memory of Colonel Sartoris exempting her from taxes. This incident then transitions to the aldermen's attempt to collect taxes from Emily after the Colonel's death. The storytelling mimics the random nature of human memory.

The narrator foreshadows the grim discovery at the story's end through several scenes. Initially, when describing the aldermen's visit to collect taxes, Emily’s house is depicted as dilapidated, almost like a mausoleum, and Emily herself is likened to a drowned corpse. In section 2, the stench emanating from the Grierson house is unmistakably associated with death. Another striking example of foreshadowing is when Emily refuses for three days to release her father's body after his death. Once Emily gains access to another corpse, she fiercely guards it for over forty years!

Point of View

The point of view in “A Rose for Emily” is distinctive. The story is narrated by an unnamed voice using the first-person collective perspective. One could argue that the narrator is a central character. While there are subtle hints about the narrator’s age, race, gender, and social class, the identity is never fully disclosed. Isaac Rodman points out in The Faulkner Journal that the general consensus is that the narrator represents the community's voice. (Rodman, however, presents a compelling argument that the narrator might be a solitary or eccentric figure speaking from a position of ‘‘ironic detachment.’’)

Regardless of the narrator's identity, he emerges as a witty, humorous, and empathetic storyteller. His cleverness is evident in how he constructs the narrative to lead to an unexpected climax. His humor shines through his nearly whimsical tone, even in what many would consider a grim story. Lastly, the narrator displays empathy for both Emily and the town of Jefferson. This is shown by his pity for Emily and his recognition that the town’s reactions are shaped by circumstances beyond its control (‘‘Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town’’).

Setting

‘‘A Rose for Emily’’ is set in Faulkner’s fictional county, Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi. The town of Jefferson serves as the county seat. In William Faulkner: His Life and Work, David Minter notes, ‘‘More than any major American writer of our time, including Robert Frost, Faulkner is associated with a region. He is our great provincial.’’ Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County are inspired by the real town of Oxford and Lafayette County in Mississippi, where Faulkner spent much of his life. Once he created this fictional yet familiar setting, he could unleash his creativity to craft a history for Yoknapatawpha and fill the county with vivid characters like Emily Grierson and Colonel Sartoris. The land and its history significantly influence many of Faulkner’s characters. Emily is no exception; she remains ensnared in Jefferson’s past.

Structure

The finest of Faulkner’s works are marked by their meticulous structure. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are prime examples of his bold experimentation with point of view and time in the novel. Faulkner wrote ‘‘A Rose for Emily’’ during the same period he was working on these novels. The story fluidly shifts back and forth in time over nearly fifty years through its five sections. Each episode in Emily’s life and Jefferson’s history is clearly interrelated, yet the clues are not presented in chronological order. Consequently, the final scene is impactful because the narrator does not recount the story in a straightforward, start-to-finish manner. This is why the story becomes even more engaging and illuminating upon a second reading.