In the short story, “A Rose For Emily”, the story seems to be told in an objective point of view. You never read into Emily, her servant, father, cousins, or Homer's thoughts. The story was being told in the third person, and I couldn't quite put my finger on who was exactly narrating the story. I believed that it was someone in the town that was narrating “A Rose For Emily”. The story opens with “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant-a combined gardner and cook had seen in at least ten years”(33). This opening illustrated that the narrator not only knew about Emily and her life but also knew about the people that lived in the town. As I continued to read, my thoughts about who the narrator was shifted to not one person but to multiple people that lived in the town. I came to this belief because the narrator had said, “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door”(36). When the narrator said we I knew that the observations about Emily were not by one singular person.
The narration of the story is very unusual because it is told in third person. The narration seems to be told by more than one person, possibly the entire town. As well, the story doesn't flow in chronological order. For example, the story flashes forward and backwards from points in time to other points in time with no real structure. In the beginning of the story, the setting was Miss Emily's funeral, then the story reverts back to her older years when she refused to pay her taxes. The story then regresses back to when her father died. It then flashed forward to when she met a man that would not marry her and finally ended with her death. I'm not sure why Faulkner chose to write from this point of view, but I really enjoyed reading “A Rose For Emily.” Seeing Miss Emily's life through the eyes of the people in the town gave me an impression of what kind of person she was. I saw Miss Emily as a lonely, high class southern woman who was unwilling to change from the old generation into the new. Maybe Faulkner set this point of view so you, the reader, could make your own opinion about Miss Emily and how people viewed her. The whole town was intrigued by Miss Emily and her life but no one seemed to know her except for what they could observe with their eyes.
Having the point of view be objective helped to illustrate the theme of the story. My belief was that the entire town was captivated by Miss Emily's isolated life. She lived her whole life in her house only stepping outside on a few occasions. As the town she lived in began to fade from the old and grow into the new Miss Emily didn't want to move forward with the changing times. An objective view allowed me to see that Miss Emily didn't want to change with the town, for example, “It was a big, squarish house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most selective street. 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 gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores”(34). If the point of view had been from Miss Emily's perspective I imagine I would have envisioned the setting of her house quite differently. When the new generation told Miss Emily she needed to pay taxes she refused. When the town got free postal delivery she had refused to let them put numbers and a mail box on her property. Everything narrated by the people of the town illustrated how Missy Emily was an isolated woman who would not embrace a new generation.
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