The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee -- a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face (Faulkner 53).
It is Emily's hanging onto the past that is the resounding feeling throughout Faulkner's story. The story begins where the reader learns of her death, but the reader is then taken on her journey, her slow giving in to death. In fact, Faulkner describes her as "bloated, like a body submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue" (Faulkner 49), giving the idea of a woman who has physically lived life, but yet is still hanging on, floating in life, motionless and suspended in a world that also won't let her go.
What perhaps is the most troubling about Faulkner's story, and what resounds for all readers who read "A Rose for Emily," is the way in which Emily is not only not able to move with the times, but that she is not able to let go of anything. First her father's death and then Homer's. She is responsible for killing Homer and it is her way of keeping him near her -- though...
No one is able to escape death and thus no one is able to escape time. Though Emily kept Homer in her house until he "had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay" (Faulkner 59), it was not the Homer she had tried so desperately to keep with her. The above
description of Homer is a rather grotesque one, but Getty notes that it is an important as perhaps he like a rose petal, saved between the pages of a book (230).
Emily Grierson is an important literary character, and perhaps one of the most important of all time because she is the ultimate symbol of time and a person's inability to control it. It is a universal story that will forever resonate with humans because of our obsession with our own passing time and what will become of us in the distant (or near) future.
Works Cited
Booth, Alison. & Mays, Kelly J. Wm. Faulkner. A Rose for Emily. The Norton Introduction to Literature (Shorter Tenth Edition). W.W. Norton & Company; Shorter Tenth Edition
edition, 2010. Print.
Getty, Laura J. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'." The Explicator, Vol. 63, No. 4, pp. 23-4.
Summer 2005.
Klein, Thomas. "The Ghostly Voice of Gossip in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'." the
Explicator, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 229-32. Summer 2007.
