“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner is a thrilling story with some unexpected surprises. William Faulkner keeps the reader intrigued as to Miss Emily’s life and circumstances. Faulkner leaves the audience with some major questions, part of what makes the story so interesting. It leaves lots of room for interpretation.
I believe Miss Emily could not find a suitable suitor because she rarely left her home. She was also from what sounds like a well-to-do family. Perhaps the narrator did not feel that anyone was of that scale. Maybe the townspeople thought that no one could live up to her father’s expectations.
Miss Emily appears to love Homer. I filled in the questions about his death with my own view on the story. I believe Homer had to leave Miss Emily, not because of her sisters being there, but because he had a sick family member he needed to tend to. Perhaps he had a sick parent or sibling. Homer leaving while Miss Emily’s sisters were there was purely coincidental. While Homer was away, he himself got sick, probably with what his sick relative had. It has just occurred to me that Miss Emily probably would have caught his sickness as well if this were the case; however, the story is more appealing to me if she did not murder him. Why would she kill him if she loved him? Apparently she had to have loved him. She slept with his dead corpse for what appeared to be years. Miss Emily had a much skewed view of life and death. There is nothing normal about her behavior. She seems to have a hard time adjusting to change. She stays in a moment and cannot move on, for example, when she did not want the townspeople to bury her father. That was a big change for her that she could not deal with.
The fear Miss Emily felt when the men of the town were spreading lime on her lawn was probably from the fear of being discovered. Not because she may get in trouble but fear that they would force her to bury Homer. She would no longer have him. He was the only man she had ever loved and did not want to lose that. The situation was similar with her father. I believe she was scared of totally losing him as well.
Tobe is another odd character in this story. There are many questions surrounding him; however since he is not a main character, there isn’t a lot of information to even guess why he stays with Miss Emily. Perhaps she did in fact murder Homer, for that matter, her father as well. Tobe would be afraid she would do the same to him. It is also possible that she treats him so much better than many other African American people were treated back then that he doesn’t mind staying with her. He may have felt like he had no other option, and it’s highly possible that for that era, he didn’t.
I really enjoyed this story, especially the ending. When the narrator describes seeing the “long strand of iron-gray hair” it gave me chills. What a dramatic, thought provoking ending.
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