Response Paper On Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” Essay, Research Paper

Callahan’s English 84 WWW Site

Response Paper on Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

By Eleni Haralambou

I read the story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. The story is told by a third person point of view. I think it is a limited point of view because you really can’t get into the heads of any of the

I read the story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. The story is told by a third person point of view. I think it is a limited point of view because you really can’t get into the heads of any of the characters to see what they are really thinking and feeling. The narrator is never really known. He is not a character in the story. The major character is Miss Emily. The story takes place in the town called Jefferson.

The narrator starts off telling us that Miss Emily was dead and everyone in the town went to her funeral. They went out of curiosity to see her and her house because it was awhile since anyone has seen them both. After reading the whole story I thought that Miss Emily was weird, depressing and crazy. I mostly say this because who in their right mind would kill a man and keep him in a locked room? After her father had driven away lots of young men and then he died and then her sweetheart deserted her, she needed to be secure that no one else would leave and abandon her. So her motivation, I think, for killing Homer Barren (H.B.) was to keep him with her forever.

I saw some foreshadowing of death when she went to buy the arsenic. This hinted that somebody was going to die but we did not know who. I thought, just as the others thought,that she would kill herself but it ended up that she killed H.B. and she died of natural causes at the age of seventy-four.

I think, the story was titled “A Rose for Emily” because at the end of the story it describes the room furnished for a bridal in rose color and rose is a symbol for love.