The Insight Into “a Rose for Emily”

The Insight Into “A Rose for Emily” In the literature piece of “A Rose for Emily” it’s clear that change is essential in a person’s life. Emily is an example of this based on how she stays in the past throughout the story. She remains the same since her pre-civil war self and Faulkner would agree that the past should stay in the past. The narrator is spoken in third person and he is seen as ghostly since his identity is unknown, from context clues you can assume it’s someone in the town “But the voice of the town is the most ghostlike: pervasive, shape-shifting, haunting. No wonder Miss Emily stayed indoors (Klein). Time is very important all throughout the short story it’s ”divided into five sections, the first and last section having to do with the present, the now of the narration, with the three middle sections detailing the past”(Davis). In “A Rose For Emily” there are examples of several types of conflict from having to do with Emily’s own self-depression and anxiety, her disconnection from the community, and from characters that are not accepted in her community- Homer Barron and Tobe. First, a literary term that is seen all throughout miss Emily’s journey is a self vs. self conflict. In the story chronologically everything arose from the death of her father, which just tore Emily up. She is always yearning for her father and it shows by the way her house stands still just like when her father lived there for example “On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father” (Faulkner 392). Emily has a mental problems that she doesn’t even realize like she is in a fantasy world even though her actions say otherwise she’s irrational and she won’t even pay her taxes. She never leaves her home and she’s enclosed for 10 years with no fresh air that must suffocate a person physically and mentally. The story is even structured in a way to indicate her lonely ways of life “Faulkner’s structural problem in “A Rose For Emily”