Dorie Love-Ashby
P. Elmore
Composition II 1302-7420
5/25/11
FAULKNER
Faulkner was born in 1897, to a genteel southern family. His father, Murry Cuthbert Falkner, was a railroad worker, owner of a cottonseed oil and ice plant, livery stable operator, hardware store employee, and secretary and business manager at University of Mississippi. His mother was Maud Butler Falkner. Falkner grew up and spent most of his life, off and on, in Oxford, Mississippi. He trained for the Royal Air Force in Canada, and later the British Royal Air Force during World War I, but the war was over before he saw action. After the war he briefly attended the University of Mississippi. He married Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin, June 20, 1929.
The Faulkner works were greatly influenced by his family history. The area in which he lived had a great deal to do with his sense of the doleful position of Black and WhiteAmericans. This also influenced his sense of humor and is said to be the legacy of earlier writers like Mark Twain. Faulkner was best known for his novels, but he also wrote short stories, poetry and occasional screenplays.. Film versions have been made of several of his works: Sanctuary (1961), Intruder in the Dust (1949),
The Sound and the Fury(1959), The Reivers (1969), and Pylon (1957; or Tarnished Angels). Others (Requiem for a Nun, 1951, and "Barn Burning") have been filmed for television. (Pierce, Constance, and Heller)

Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern
American novel" (Nobel Prize Literature).Faulkner also won two Pulitzer Prizes for his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was awarded the Pulitzer in 1963 after he died. On August 3, 1987, the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in his honor. (Scott catalogue #2350)

There is a compilation of Faulkner's works called The Portable Faulkner. In it is a short story called A Rose For Emily. Faulkner writes about Miss Emily Grierson an old aristocratic lady who was looked up to and seen as "a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town" (392) because she represented the oldest families of the town, and the last of the old southern ways. Upon her death the townspeople went into her upstairs bedroom and found the remains of her boyfriend from years ago. "The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace" (402) On the pillow next to him there was an indentation and a long strand of iron- gray hair where she had layed her head. “The epiphany of the towns people was that maybe she was not really to be as revered as everyone had thought in the past.” (stacyhm) After all those years it turns out that she was a very disturbed person, and hindsight reveals that none of this is suprising because mental sickness ran in her family. Everyone put the pieces together in that moment and it all made sense.

Faulkner chose one trickiest feats, which was to narrate a story in the first-person plural. There have been debates as to the identity of the narrator, some say it is a male, possibly an old gentleman suitor, and others say it's a female, some believe them to be Emily's age, and others think the person is younger. I agree with the scholar in the lecture video when he says the narrator a is a nameless townsperson. A collective point of view of the town from an ordinary layperson, who was younger than Miss Emily, and grew old though out the story. The gender of the narrator, which is also the focus of much controversy, is never revealed. It doesn't seem to have any bearing on the direction of the story and I believe is not of importance, although it may be fun to ponder and hypothesize.
The references of the narrator to the town being “our town” as in the following: "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 gardener and cook- had seen in at least ten years" (393), denotes that this narrator is a townsperson. The fact that this person also knows the townspeople's reasons for being there that day also shows that this person is in touch with the feelings and thoughts of the townspeople regarding Miss Emily.

There are parts of the story where narrator refers to both generations of mayors and aldermen of the town as “them” and “their”, and therefore gives me the impression the the narrator is a layperson. For example: "So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before that about the smell." (394) This language supports my theory that this person is a Joe Town Person that separates themselves from the higher-ups of the community.

I get the feeling that the narrator is a little younger than Miss Emily, because they are somehow impressed by her arrogant aristocratic manner. The way she had those gentlemen skulking around at night to spread lyme over the stink coming from her house, and having her manservant, Tobe, show out the gentlemen who dared come after her for taxes had elevated Miss Emily. She was intimidating and the younger more impressionable narrator sees her as someone with strength and gall, when other townspeople accused the Griersons of holding themselves a little too high for what they really were.
Since the narrator could not see behind closed doors, I do not believe they are an omniscient or all-seeing narrator. When Faulkner writes: "We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that" (396), it says to me that this person speculated and watched from the outside like all the other townspeople. The point of view stays consistent and does not shift from Faulkner, to omniscient narrator to townsperson. This person seems to have grown old while watching the life and times of Miss Emily. They have related the important things Miss Emily did during her lifetime; and by the story's end, the narrator gives her a gift, a "rose" by telling her disturbing story in a sympathetic and compassionate way.

Works Cited
Melczarek, Nick. "Narrative Motivation in Faulkner's A ROSE FOR EMILY." Explicator 67.4 (2009): 237-243. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 23 May 2011.
Pierce, Constance, and Terry Heller. "William Faulkner." Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2001): 1-7. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 23 May 2011.
The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, Viking, 1946, revised and expanded edition, 1967 (published in England as The Essential Faulkner, Chatto & Windus, 1967)
Robertson, Alice. "The Ultimate Voyeur: The Communal Narrator of "A Rose for Emily.." Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 6.2 (2006): 154-165. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 23 May 2011
"William Faulkner - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 22 May 2011 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html
A Rose for Emily Lecture Part I. Dir. stacyhm." 2007, Film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp7p0exVnqo.

1. Obituary Variety, July 11, 1962.
21. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949". Nobelprize.org. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949. Retrieved July 25, 2009.
22. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949: Documentary". Nobelprize.org. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/award-docu.html. Retrieved July 25, 2009.
23.^ Gordon, Debra. "Faulkner, William". In Bloom, Harold, ed. William Faulkner, Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2002. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. BCWF02&SingleRecord=True Facts On File, Inc.
24.^ "Oregon Lit Rev website". Oregonlitrev.org. http://www.oregonlitrev.org/v2n2/OLR-rickert.htm#faulkner. Retrieved March 10, 2010. 25. ^ Scott catalog # 2350. 26. TO CITE THIS PAGE:
MLA style: "William Faulkner - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 22 May 2011 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html 27. The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, Viking, 1946, revised and expanded edition, 1967 (published in England as The Essential Faulkner, Chatto & Windus, 1967) 28.
“Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows—she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house—like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.” (128)

Because “A Rose for Emily” is narrated in retrospect, this description of Miss Emily’s relationship with the town possesses a kind of foreshadowing not always present in stories narrated as the action unfolds. Each word takes on added meaning given that the narrator already knows about Homer Barron and the room upstairs.

Thinking back, the narrator recalls, “Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows.” Likely, it only occurred to the narrator after learning about Homer Barron that Miss Emily was always in a downstairs window. In fact, earlier in the story, the narrator only says that “a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it” when the men of the won sprinkled lime ar... who seemingly speaks for the town but simultaneously draws back from it? The narrator makes judgments both for and against Miss Emily, and also presents outside observations -- particularly in Section IV, when we first learn many details about her. At the beginning of the story, the narrator seems young, is easily influenced, and is very impressed by Miss Emily's arrogant, aristocratic existence; later, in Section IV, this person seems as old as Miss Emily and has related all the important things Miss Emily has done during her lifetime; and by the story's end, the narrator, having grown old with her, is presenting her with a "rose" by sympathetically and compassionately telling her bizarre and macabre story.

April 18, 2004
THE LAST WORD
We the Characters
By LAURA MILLER riters have set some perversely difficult tasks for themselves: composing a novel entirely devoid of the letter ''E,'' for example, or a novel in which the chapters can be read in a number of different orders. One of the trickiest feats is to narrate a story in the first-person plural. It's so hard, in fact, that among the dispiritingly vast array of titles shelved in my local bookstore's How to Write
Fiction section, few even mention the first-person plural as an option. John Gardner's classic, ''The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers,'' refers to it in passing as ''the 'town' point of view, in which the voice in the story is some unnamed spokesman for all the community,'' and notes that
William Faulkner's short story ''A Rose for Emily'' is the best-known example. But even in the sentence or two he devotes to the subject, Gardner assumes too much. Is the ''we'' who narrates Faulkner's Gothic tale about a reclusive spinster really ''some unnamed spokesman'' or is it the town itself?
Modern readers find collective first-person narrators unsettling; the contemporary mind keeps searching for the familiarity of an individual point of view, since it seems impossible that a group could think and feel, let alone act, as one. The ancient Greeks believed otherwise. Their drama, which is the root of our novel, emerged from the dithyramb, a hymn to the god Dionysus, originally recited in unison by 50 men, a collective voice that survived in the form of the Greek chorus. You could say that the history of
Western literature so far has been a journey from the first-person plural to the first-person singular, the signature voice of our time. The solitary first-person narrator -- confessional, idiosyncratic, often unreliable -- is the choice of novelists ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Philip Roth in some of their most celebrated works. Truth, these writers suggest, is slippery and protean, and authenticity can be found only in individual experience. Broader claims to authority are suspect. To presume to speak, as novelists once blithely did, for a nation, a city or, especially, a generation is to invite protest and ridicule. All this makes the first-person-plural narrator both a risky proposition and a striking effect, if a writer can pull it off. In clumsy hands, it may seem merely a stunt or, in the case of Ayn Rand's ''Anthem,'' a novella about a collectivist dystopia, drearily tendentious. As Gardner points out, Faulkner, in having the town describe Emily Grierson's courtship and its strange aftermath, thrusts his story's theme -- community values versus personal values,'' in Gardner's formulation -- to the fore. Too much message too heavily delivered can break the spell, but ''A Rose for Emily'' is a horror story, not a parable, and by keeping the reader at arm's length from the doings in the Grierson house, Faulkner forces us to imagine the grisly scenes inside. ''A Rose for Emily'' is as much about privacy versus curiosity or voyeurism as it is about a conflict in values; its power comes from the secrets its narrators can guess at but never get to see. What unites the townsfolk is their shared status of being shut out.
This points to a provocative contrast between the ways writers have used the first-person plural: for male writers, the collective narrator is most often on the outside trying to peep in -- usually at a woman
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > The Last Word: We the Characters http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/books/review/18MILLERT.html?pagewanted=print&position= or women -- but female writers speak from the center of the mystery. Jeffrey Eugenides's novel ''The
Virgin Suicides'' tells of the deaths of the five teenage Lisbon sisters from the perspective of a group of neighborhood boys who adore them from afar. The sisters are kept sequestered by their parents; the isolation might be what drives them to kill themselves. The reason for the suicides remains elusive, however, and this uncertainty compels the boys to pore over the ''evidence'' the Lisbon sisters left behind, searching for clues. The ''we'' who narrates Joan Chase's ''During the Reign of the Queen of
Persia,'' on the other hand, is, like the Lisbon sisters, an amalgamation of young girls -- two pairs of sisters, the daughters of two sisters -- who describe their coming-of-age in their grandmother's farmhouse in Ohio.
The communal inclinations of women, though often praised, are riddled with ambivalence, and that makes the first-person plural a particularly fraught choice for women writers. Chase's collective narrator is like a puddle of mercury: any drops that temporarily separate from the whole are soon sucked back in. But the idyllic union of their girlhood threatens to become the suffocating, fretful attachment of their mothers' generation, women who can't escape their sisterly bonds to form significant relationships with men. A husband of one of these older women likens the sisters to a close stand of trees, ''their slender branches intertwined, thrashing in any wind at all, making much ado about nothing. The sawn-off waterlogged stumps he compared to the few men who ever dared to approach.''
THE latest literary venture in first-person plural is Kate Walbert's exquisite ''Our Kind,'' also about a group of women, this time related not by blood but by class and historical moment. They are a handful of upper-middle-class ladies living in a Northeastern suburb, the last generation of such women raised to believe that life offered them no decent alternative to marriage, motherhood and homemaking. They have survived divorce, widowhood, disease, children who self-destruct, children who never call, and now they see themselves as uninteresting, the leftovers of a jettisoned plan. When one member has the group read Virginia Woolf's ''Mrs. Dalloway,'' whose heroine is a prime specimen of ''our kind,'' they're bored; someone suggests Jane Austen for next time. Theirs is an alliance of convenience, ''all of us together, not for companionship, exactly, or high regard, but because we're in the same boat.'' Yet of all these first-person narrators, this gang is the most inviting. They are good company: funny, tough, loyal, tolerant, jaunty even in their cups. Convinced that life has passed them by, they fail to notice the gift it slipped them on the sly, an ability to be part of their ''kind'' even as each remains utterly herself. And that may be the trickiest task of all.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > The Last Word: We the Characters
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/books/review/18MILLERT.html?pagewanted=print&position=