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I download many periodicals and dissertations from all kinds of websites, and I read them over and over again. In summary, I pide the content into three types.
The first kind is about the cause of Emily’s tragedy. They talk about the reason why Emily’s life became so sad. They discuss it form the perspective of Emily’s father, social background, family background, town people, and her own experiences. I totally agree those opinions and analyses, and they become good arguments in my paper.
The second type is on William Faulkner’s excellent narrative skills. They focus on narrative order, narrative situation, and narrative perspective in this novel. Before I read these papers, I can’t research this skills by myself, and I even can’t find them. I have to admit that these ideas help me a lot.
The third type is talking about Symbolism in A Rose for Emily. They think “rose” symbolizes people’s sympathy for Emily, “the old house” symbolizes Emily’s social status, and “Emily” symbolizes the tradition of south. There is no doubt that it is the deepest understanding about the novel. If we understand the symbolism, we are getting closer to the author.
Almost all the scholars pay close attention to novel’s complicated theme and wonderful narrative techniques. Very few people have studied Emily’s murder motives, which are closely related to the theme and
narrative skills. It is because that most scholars think it is Homer Barron’s abandonment. In this paper, I will show you my understanding.
2. William Faulkner’s ingenious narrative techniques
After I read this story carefully, I find there is no description of Emily’s murder motives, even no scene of murder process. Consequently, how does readers reach the conclusion that Emily killed Homer due to Honer’s attitude to marriage? And how does narrators achieve this effect in the novel.
2.1 Mutable narrative perspective
The causes of this reading effect are very complicated, but mutable narrative perspective is one of the most important reasons. This work has three kinds of perspectives. The first is the third-person omniscient perspective. For example, “When she opened the package of home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: ‘for rats’” Apparently, this sentence is in the omniscient perspective. However, there are a few parts using omniscient perspective, and in most cases, this novel uses the second perspective, which is character limited perspective. Author use the perspectives of “they”, “the old people” and “the women” that are the characters in the work to narrate the story. The third is the perspective of spectators, which is similar to the first person (us). Because of the mixture of perspectives, the plots of this novel is very complicated. And we can’t recognize which is correct, and which is the truth. The information that given by omniscient narrators usually is more authoritative, and is more acceptable by readers. However, there are a few omniscient perspective in A Rose for Emily, and author tried to avoid the description of Emily’s mental activities. Consequently, the information that readers get is from character limited narrative and first person spectator narrative. The frequently transform of these three narrative perspectives makes readers difficult tell them apart, so they regard limited perspective as omniscient perspective, and they misunderstand what narrator said as what author said. To be more specific, the conclusion, Emily killed Homer for his abandon, that almost all the readers get, is town people’s conclusion in the novel. And this conclusion is the conjecture of town people.