A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

In A Rose for Emily Faulkner explores the argument that the advantages gained by the aristocratic classes can sometimes act as an entrapment of social constraints.

Faulkner uses the narrator in the story, as a catalyst for characterisation as the narrator is a member of the story but is unnamed and internally focalised although he/she is also omniscient so focalisation does not change during the story. Faulkner shows that the narrator is in the story itself by writing "we did not say she is crazy then" implying he/she himself or herself were concerned, this makes the narrator an "intradiegetic narrator" . The story is also not chronological which allows Faulkner give an analeptic account of Emily's life after beginning the story, which it turn allows him to begin with a puissant first paragraph consisting of one sentence in which the main character dies. The story has been described as a tragedy, even a tragic love story, ending with the Gothic horror of the discovery in the "tomb" and the "long strand of iron-grey hair" hinting at necrophilia. Many believe there are other meanings to the story, for example, some see it as an allegory of the relations between North and South America and the decline of the aristocratic South, which Faulkner often wrote about. Faulkner's own parents came from wealthy families reduced to paucity through the atrocities of the Civil War. The town in which the story is set "Jefferson" creates a fictional realm within which Faulkner could recreate the ideas from the Civil war. Faulkner has often been described as a "regional novelist" . This is shown in A Rose for Emily as Emily murders a "Yankee" from the North.

Faulkner uses the modern short story form and A Rose for Emily can be put into the category of an "epiphanic" short story as described by Thomas M.Leitch . This is because the story comes to a "climatic revelation" without having a specific plot line with "purposive agents." Faulkner also writes close to the form of the short story as you can definitely read it in one sitting and he concentrates on a brief time span. This allows him to provide us with a deeper look at Emily and the society that surrounded her in a microcosm of what Faulkner witnessed happening to many Southern aristocrats. We know Emily is an aristocrat because of her behaviour towards the issue of tax, as she believes she is above paying because she is a "Grierson.