How the Narrator Cultivates "A Rose for Emily"

The narrator's account of their pettiness, jealousy, and inability to make sense of Emily causes the reader to sympathize with Emily's eccentricities before we must judge her murderous behavior. We admire her for taking life on her own terms, and the narrator makes sure this response is in place prior to our realization that she also takes life.We don't really know much about Emily because the narrator arranges the details of her life so that it's difficult to know what she's being up to. We learn, for example, about the smell around the house before up to. We learn, for example, about the smell around the house before she buys the poison and homer disappears, so that the cause and effect relationship among these events is obscured. The narrator's chronology of events is a bit slippery, but the effect is to suspend judgment of Emily. By the time we realize what she has done we are already inclined to see her as outside community value almost out of necessity. That's not to sa
y that her life maintains its private - though no longer secret - dignity. Despite the final revelation, Emily remains "dear, inescapable. Impervious, tranquil, and perverse".The narrator's "rose" to Emily is his recognition that Emily is all these things - including "perverse". She evokes "a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument". She is, to be sure, "fallen", but she is also somehow central - a "monument" - to the life of the community. Faulkner does not offer a definitive reading of Emily but she does have the narrator pay tribute to her by attempting to provide a complex set of contexts for her actions - contexts that include a repressive father, resistance to a changing south and impinging north, the passage of time and its influence on the present, and relations between men and women as well as relations between generations. Robert Crossman points out that the "narrator is himself a 'reader' of Emily's story, trying to put together from fragments a complet
e picture, trying to find the meaning of her life in its impact upon an audience, the citizens of Jefferson, of which he is a member."

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