A rose for emily

Literary Analysis
14 November 2013

Plot Review for “A Rose for Emily”

“A Rose for Emily”, written by William Faulkner. It is the type of story that when someone reads it, they know that something is strange but they do not know what exactly it is. This story will make the reader change the way that they feel about Miss. Emily at the very end. A good story needs a good plot scheme. “A Rose for Emily” has a very well thought out plot and the way that the narrator organizes things allows the reader to pick up on sudden hints. The plot consists of the normal way people would write a story; the initial situation, the conflict, the complication, the climax, the suspense, the ending, and the conclusion. By saying this, I am going to analyze William Faulkner’s plot organization for his story, “A Rose for Emily”. The initial situation is made up about the death and taxes. At first that is the main thing going on in this story. At first the narrator talks about the time that Miss. Emily Grierson died and how the whole town came to her funeral and to her house. There was not one soul who had come into that house for more than ten years. That alone, sparks an interest. The narrator talks about the house also, how it was once a nice house and how nice the neighborhood was. Emily’s house is the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Also in the first section, the narrator tells how Colonel Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, suspended Emily’s taxes toward the town after her father had died. Her father gave the community a large amount of money, but as new members take over, they want to do away with her free taxation. The townspeople made several attempts to get Miss. Emily to pay her payments, but they all fail each time. The members of the Board of Alderman was at to her house to try to talk her into understanding that she needs to start paying taxes, but every time they would say something, all she would say was “see Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson” . Conflict plays out when not only will she not pay taxes, but her house also stinks. After her father died, she refused to believe it. For four days, she refused to let the people in the town buried him properly. Then the narrator made the story into a flashback to the summer after her father died. She finally got a boyfriend while she was in her thirties. She was worried that he would leave her so she decided that she would keep him forever. She bought some poison one day, and the next he disappeared up to the day that the whole town went into her house. There was a smell the whole time that no one could explain. The way that the author wrote this story is to give the reader just enough clues to figure out what is going on but at the same time he jumbles everything together to keep them wanting to know more. The complication would be the town. Miss. Emily had the whole town always wanting to know every step that she took and what all went out throughout her day. The town was horrible to her when she started to date Homer Barron. They all wanted to keep her to her high and mighty self. Her father put her on a pedestal and made it clear that no man would ever be good enough for her. So after her father passed, the town wanted to do the same in a way. They wanted her to stop dating Homer since it was obvious that he was gay, or so they thought. Realizing that they could not do anything to make her quit, they called for her cousins to come visit her. The climax would be when Miss. Emily bought the poison. The author goes from the past to the present of the story often. When she bought the arsenic, a powerful poison, by law she has to tell the man what she is planning on killing. She replies “For rats.” There are so many reasons that people think about why she bought the poison to kill him. According to Faulkner, Homer probably was a bit of a rat, one which noble Miss Emily would have felt perfectly in the right to exterminate. Yet, she wanted to hold tight to the dream that she might have a normal life, with love and a family.” The suspense would definitely be the gossip. As with the climax, Faulkner follows a traditional plot structure, at least in terms of the story of Emily and Homer. Emily buys the arsenic, and at that moment the information is beamed into the brains of the townspeople. This is one of the nastiest sections. The town is in suspense over whether they are married, soon will be, or never will be. Their reactions range from murderous, to pitying, to downright interference. Another big thing is that Homer was last seen going into Miss Emily’s house on the night that she bought the poison. By that alone, the reader can get a feel of what has happened. The ending is made up of the next forty years after Homer went missing. At this point the reader can figure out how Miss Emily’s life has been. Beginning with her funeral, going back to when the town tried to make her pay taxes, and then back thirty more years when her father died, the relationship with Homer and then him disappearing. There is a huge gap from the time after Homer’s death, she stopped coming out of her home. When everyone last saw her and Homer together, she was thin and her hair was long. But when the town came to collect taxes she was obese and her hair short. The only time when the people of the town saw Miss Emily was the painting lessons and the time people saw her in the window. Now for the conclusion. Was Miss Emily crazy? Possibly, she was. After Miss Emily was buried, the whole town was anxious to see inside of her house to possibly answer all of their questions. When they all rummaged through her house top and bottom, they found themselves looking into a room that hasn’t had a single soul in for years. They found a corps’ body whom was Homer, along with marriage material things. Another strange eye-opener thing they saw was the pillow with an indention of a head in the pillow beside Homer’s corpse body. When they looked closer, a long gray hair that belongs to Emily was on the pillow. Not only did she kill Homer, but she was laying with his corpse.

Citation

Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 8th ed. New York: Bedford, 2008. 95-101. Print

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