33 pages • 1 hour read
William FaulknerA Rose for Emily
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Nonlinear Narrative
Faulkner uses a nonlinear narrative structure to tell the story of Emily Grierson’s life. The story is not presented in chronological order, but rather jumps back and forth in time, creating a sense of disorientation and mystery. By withholding information and revealing details in a nonlinear way, Faulkner forces his reader to piece together the events of Emily’s life over time, just as the townspeople of Jefferson must do. This creates a sense of distance and estrangement from the main character, as the reader never receives a clear picture of her motivations or inner thoughts.
The nonlinear narrative also enables Faulkner to build suspense and tension throughout the story. The disjointed structure allows the reader to experience the story in a way that is both disorienting and compelling and adds to the overall impact of the narrative as it moves to its tragic conclusion.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device used to provide hints or clues about future events. Faulkner uses foreshadowing to create suspense and tension throughout the story. The opening section of the story suggests that the Grierson house holds horrible secrets: The “dim hall […] smelled of dust and disuse” (48) and Emily herself resembled “a body long submerged in motionless water (49). These dark, unsettling images foreshadow Homer’s eventual death and the decay of his corpse.
Faulkner’s use of foreshadowing is also connected to the story’s nonlinear narrative. For example, before the character of Homer Barron is fully introduced, the narrator refers to a sweetheart of Emily’s “who deserted her” (50). By the time the narrative introduces Homer, there is a suggestion of how he might leave her. The hints dropped throughout the story make the shocking twist at the end even more upsetting, as readers can look back and see the evidence of Emily’s growing capacity for violence.
Irony
Throughout the story, Faulkner employs situational and dramatic irony to highlight the gap between appearance and reality in the South during the Reconstruction era. One example of situational irony in the story is the fact that Emily, a symbol of the Old South and its values, is the one who ultimately destroys the traditions and values she embodies. Despite her stubborn insistence on upholding the traditions of the past, she kills Homer Barron, the one person who might have allowed her to break free from her isolation and loneliness.
An example of dramatic irony emerges through the story’s narrative style. The story is told from the perspective of the townspeople, who are unreliable and biased narrators. As a result, the reader is left to piece together the truth of Emily’s life from fragments and hints, and readers must question the reliability of what is presented. In this way, Faulkner uses irony to comment on the elusive nature of truth after periods of violence and the ways in which our perceptions and biases can shape our understanding of the world around us.
Contrast
The use of contrast in “A Rose for Emily” serves to underscore the tensions and contradictions that defined life in the South during the Reconstruction era. By highlighting the differences and similarities between characters, settings, and themes, Faulkner creates a rich and complex portrait of a community in transition. One of the most significant examples of contrast in the story is between the past and the present. The traditions and values of the past are embodied in characters like Emily, who represent a bygone era of wealth, power, and social standing. By contrast, characters like Homer Barron and the newer, more modern generation of townspeople represent the changes and upheavals of the present.
Another example of contrast is between the public and private spheres of life. The public sphere is dominated by gossip, speculation, and judgment, while the private sphere is marked by secrecy, isolation, and death. Emily’s house, with its decaying façade and macabre secrets, serves as a powerful symbol of this contrast, highlighting the gap between the public and private aspects of life in the town.
Diction and Syntax
Rhetorically, Faulkner is known for the rich complexity of his sentence structures. In describing the state of Emily’s house, Faulkner writes:
But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores (47).
Faulkner equates modern buildings to the growth of an invasive weed, such as crabgrass, while the older Grierson house is something akin to a dying tree. Rather than state this metaphor directly, however, Faulkner uses structural metaphor, in which one concept (architecture) is described in the terms of another (vegetation). Using this technique, the structure of his sentence undergirds the structure of his metaphor, efficiently incorporating the concept of vegetative time to the idea of architectural order, as in the exclusive verbs “encroached and obliterated.” In this way, the death that surrounds Emily is embodied within Faulkner’s language; her life is such a sentence, first encroached upon, then obliterated.
Faulkner punctuates such long and florid sentences with sharp, efficient sentences. In the final paragraphs, after excessively detailing the clothing, shoes, and other implements that surround Homer’s deathbed in flourishes of literal and rhetorical cobwebs, Faulkner writes a single, simple sentence, encompassing a paragraph of its own: “The man himself lay in the bed” (59).
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