Letting Go- A Rose for Emily

    With a story so jumbled and mixed up, it is difficult to come up with a series of events that help us to understand and identify with our main character, Emily, in A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. The reason the story does not have much of a timeline is the point of view and narrator(s). The story is told by her town, so the story is based off of rumors because not many people were close to her.
    Even so, we can gather some information on Emily, just based on these rumors. She had a difficult time letting things go. We see several examples of this throughout the story. When her father died, it was written that, "She told them that her father was not dead". Emily did not want to believe that he was gone, so she refused to. Although we do not get the same direct information as that, we can also assume that it was the same way with Homer Barron. It was said that he liked men, which made him not able to marry or have a relationship with Emily. Instead of letting him go, she gets poison, and at the end of the story, we come to know and understand that she killed Homer, and had kept his body in a room that she visited often. What we can tell from both of these examples is that she was holding on to what little she had. Her father and Homer were the only people she was even remotely close to, which eventually drove her to insanity.