A Rose for Emily

Faulkner uses first person plural to narrate “A Rose for Emily.”  However the first person point of view is very limited and the people telling the story honestly know very little about the main character, Emily.  Out of all of the characters in Faulkner’s essay, only two have real interaction and create relationships with Emily: Homer Barron and her servant, Tobe.

If the point of view was shifted to be told from either Homer Barron’s or Tobe’s point of view, not only would Emily’s character be more developed, but the mystery and suspense level of the story would be alleviated.  The majority of the plot is centered on the relationship between Homer Barron and Emily, and how his “disappearance” affects her.  However in this situation, the narrators knows very little about the two of them.  The only thing mentioned is that the entire town expected them to get married—yet at other times, he writes that he was “not surprised when Homer Barron… was gone.”  If the story was told in his perspective, we, as the audience, would not only know his reasoning for “leaving,” but we would also inevitably find out Emily’s biggest secret: she murdered Homer. 

If Tobe were narrating the story, the entire tone would also be different.  In the actual version, Faulkner points out that the townspeople always tried to question Tobe to figure out what was going inside that closed house of hers.  But if Tobe were telling the story, there would be fewer secrets because he had to have known what was going on.

In general, with the point of view from either of these characters, the town’s perspective of Emily would have been less obvious.  Tobe especially was a character that rarely even came out of Emily’s house, much less had real interaction with the townspeople.