Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

In the story “A Rose for Emily” I feel the theme Faulkner wanted to get across was that you are to never judge a book by its cover, and how the effects of time and life’s challenges change many things. This story was a little hard for me to follow because as it describes Miss Emily Grierson’s life and death it jumps from one part to another without any order.

Miss Emily was a lady who was despised by some, but by the time she died, most thought she was crazy and felt pity for her. The narrator takes us through many events of Miss Emily’s life. In the beginning of her life she is living in a nice house and taking care of her father. She is an unmarried woman because her father would run off any perspective suitors. It isn’t long until her father dies and the town gets an idea that Miss. Emily is crazy! She denied that her father had died for three days until she finally gave in and let the towns people burry him. One of the reasons why she was trying to hold on to her father and not admit that he was dead is he was the only one in her life that cared for her, everyone else was just the helpers.

A while after her father died a northern named Homer Barron entered the town to do some paving work. People around town started seeing Miss. Emily and him together. About a year later Emily went it the drugstore and asked for arsenic. The druggist informed her that she had to tell him what she was planning on doing with it, but never got a reply. Emily then started buying items for a man. This is significant because it foreshadows that Emily has a man in her life and is possibly going to kill him with the poison.

There was a long period of time that no one saw Emily or Homer. Everyone thought that Homer had run off because he didn’t want to get married and Emily became depressed. The story comes to a climax after Emily dies. The women of the town wanted to see the inside of her house, because no one had for years. In the house they found all the men’s things that she bought that looked as if they had just been removed. In the same room, they saw a man in the bed that had started to decay, and on the pillow beside him was a hair the same color as Emily’s. Emily had no other choice but to kill Homer, in her mind. She had already lost one man she loved and tried to hang onto him after he died. I guess she figured that was the only way for a man to be with her. She had been through so much in her life I believe it made her crazy.