Critical Paper A Rose for Emily

In the story of “A Rose for Emily”, a kind of point of view that is used was first point of view of multiple characters where the narrator is one of the characters in the story. The multiple characters narrate the actions of a group of characters while never referring to a “me” and only to a “we” of the group. It was evident that the narrator was one of the townspeople who were very objective in presenting the facts of the story.

He told us about what the townspeople think of Miss Emily but he didn’t judge her. He clearly presented a reality, not an illusion in which Miss Emily was the one who’s really struggling with the concept of reality vs. illusion and also living one way while hiding a terrible secret (reality vs. appearance). One of the main themes of the story is that people should let go of their past, moving on with the present so that they can prepare to welcome their future.

Emily was the proof of a person who always lived on the shadow of the past because she was afraid of changing. She did not accept the passage of time throughout all her life, keeping everything she loved in the past with her. The first evident was about the description of Grierson’s house which was still remained like a symbol of seventieth century while the society was changing every minute.

The second evident was the event that Miss Emily declined to pay taxes because in her mind, her family was powerful and they didn’t have to pay any taxes in the town of Jefferson and the third was the fact that Miss Emily had kept her father’s death body inside the house and didn’t allow burying him. And last evident which was also the most interesting of this story, the discovery of Homer Barron’s skeleton in the secret room which can be understood that Miss Emily was afraid that he would leave her and she decided to kill him because she was afraid of losing him.

Another theme of the story is that not all things, people, and events are always what they appears to be, which was associated and expressed many times throughout the story. The townspeople viewed Miss Emily as a strange old woman. Not until after her death when the men opened the secret room and found the corpse of Homer Barron, did the citizens and the reader realized that Miss Emily had gone insane.