A Summary and Analysis of William Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'

RUNNING HEAD: ENGLISH 0
A ROSE FOR EMILY:
LITERATURE
ANALYSIS

ENGLISH 2
William Faulkner was the Great American and a Nobel Prize winner who published
exemplary novels, plays, short stories and poetries. He was known for the novels and short
stories. He was considered the most celebrated authors of southern literature where he had
published several famous novels that included The Revivers, A fable. From his highly successful
short stories, one such story is a Rose to Emily, which revolves around the life of high status
young woman Emily.
Thesis- Death and change are the inevitable truths of life which made Emily Rose for its self
denial.
In the story, William Faulkner writes about the young woman Emily who is caught in the
cycle of self- denial, when her father accidently dies. The author weighs on the importance of
accepting the realities of life whether it is happiness or grief. In the story, through the life
account of Rose Emily, the author tries to capture the various aspects of the nineteenth century
where the racial discrimination was prominent in the patriarchy society as Emily was criticized
on various occasions (Afsar & Masood, 2018).
The story comes up with the hidden message that is concerned with the death and change.
The story starts with the funeral of Miss Emily and leaves the readers started in the end when the
Emily kills Homer. In the first part of the story when his father dies, Emily was unable to accept
his death and acted, as he was alive by holding on to his corpse. She was afraid of accepting the
reality of death. In the story, Emily is shown highly apprehensive of accepting the changes that
were brought to her in life, which is shown from the episode when she falls in love with homer
and kills him so that he does not leave her. Moreover, she never allowed any one to enter in her
house after her father’s death (Pratiwi, l Jihan, & Niswaty, 2019).
The story can also be analyzed from the racial grounds where the prominent
discrimination between various classes can be shown which are suggestive through the words
used in story that included ‘Negro’ or ‘Nigger’. The usages of such words are suggestive of the
discrimination posed to African American in those days. In another sentence that included
“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon
the town. Dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartorius, the Mayor –he who fathered the
edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the