Theme Of Isolation And Death In A Rose For Emily

The setting, the main characters, and the narrator for the short story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, give it a theme of isolation and death. The setting of a small town helps you focus on the main house, Miss Emily’s House, and you see the changes around her house and how the house remains the same as years go by. The main character, Miss Emily, Homer Barron, and the servant, are important people because they each connect with the isolation and death. The narrator also helps to display the themes with the words that are used when describing the setting, the character, and then separating away from the other people to connect with Miss Emily to understand what was going through her head.
The setting is based on a small town where it seems that everybody knows everybody and notice everything. The changes in the town is a representation of the changes in the world,

She is also somebody that the townspeople feel they have the need to care for because they see her as part of the town’s history, the narrator describes her as, “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town…” (Faulkner, I) She was “tradition” and “duty”, they felt an obligation of keeping her and not letting her go because she was a historical figure to them. She also represents death because even though she wanted everything to be left the same, she was physically changing and getting old, the older you get the closer you get to death. Her hair was turning gray and the narrator says her body, “looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water…” (Faulkner, I), a “motionless body” makes you think of a death person. When her father died, she was not able to believe that he was dead and wanted to keep him in the house. She could not let go of her death