Imageries Unveiled of William Faulkner - Essay Example

The general tone is one of obscurity and inconspicuous violence. It contains inconceivably dark images, which this paper is going to explore in the following paragraphs. After the first reading of the story, the reader is sufficiently horrified. But the techniques used by Faulkner make it slightly painless to digest the grotesqueness of the plot. One technique used by the author is that of jumbling the chronology of events in a suspenseful manner. The other is that of the narrator’s shifting point of view, which lays stress on Miss Emily’s strength of rationale, her detachment, and her conceit.

This diminishes the repugnance of her actions. The narrator of “A Rose for Emily” functions like a mirror upon Miss Emily Grierson’s life. One critic, Kenneth Payson Kempton calls her an “extreme of anonymity” yet he asserts his point across the story (Sullivan 1971). Faulkner’s use of symbols and metaphors in the story enhances the intensity of the plot. The story starts with the funeral of Miss Emily to be held in her house, not the Church. The narrator describes Miss Emily and her house.

She is compared with the decay of her house in many physical, emotional, and mental ways. She also represents the Old South through her Southern heritage, points of view, and stubbornness. Her death becomes a symbol of a dying generation since Old South generations were deteriorating very rapidly due to the changing customs and traditions. Faulkner describes her as dressed in black, leaning on a cane. Her “skeleton” is small and she looks “bloated” with a “pallid hue”. He avoids directly saying that she is dead.

These phrases of depiction add to the gothic quality of the story. The back-and-forth movement of the narrative gives the reader a close-up of her life. She remains in denial after her father’s death. For three days she insists that her father is not dead. This prepares the reader to expect a similar gesture from her after she poisons her lover, Homer Barron. Emily’s house is an emblem of alienation and death, enveloped with mental illness. Just like Emily, the house, too, is an object of fascination for the townspeople.

Another symbol in the story is the strand of hair found on the pillow next to the corpse. It reminds the reader of the lost love and the extent to which people can go in pursuit of happiness. It also reveals a woman’s inner life, which refuses to submit and chooses to remain in solitude all her life. Emily, as stubborn and strict as she is, believes in abiding by the rules but her morality makes it permissible for her to murder. The narrator foreshadows the discovery of the strand of hair while he portrays Emily’s transformation as she ages.

The reader also comes across “black”, as a color with very strong imagery. It represents loss, melancholy, and obscurity. In her youth, Emily is completely shut from her sympathetic environment (Watkins 1954). She belonged to an aristocratic family. Her father occupied a high social position in the town of Jefferson. He shunned Emily from the rest of the world and forbade her to meet anyone. This attitude was so detrimental to her personality that she could never overcome its strength. She became extremely reliant on her father that it later became difficult for her to forget him.