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Shiva Kumar Katepalli

Beauty's Innocence

Personal events occurring in stories play a major role in shaping characters. Different people react to such events in many different ways and they often mentally or emotionally de-personalize themselves from the society. The story "A Rose For Emily" by William Faulkner opens with an unnamed narrator describing the main character, Miss Emily Grierson's funeral. The story further unfolds by disclosing her isolating character. Miss Emily tries to distance herself from her father’s death and losing her loved one, Homer Barron. All the elements as perceived through the eyes of the narrator work well together where the narrator writes, "after he father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all." This clearly relates to the theme, as it shows her intentional alienation from the outside world.

Miss Emily tries to distance herself from her father’s death to avoid fear of being lonely. Town people say “She told them that her father was not dead” (Faulkner 703). When town ladies came to pay their condolence to her father, Emily was normal and she was trying to behave as if nothing had happened and her father was alright. She thought this might keep town people from burying her father’s dead body. She was happy at least to be with her father’s dead body rather than being alone and suffer.

Miss Emily has very sensitive character and that when it comes to loving a person, she loves them to death. She loves them so much that the women never want to be away from her loved ones even after their death. To make this point more appropriate to the readers the narrator writes, "she told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body" (Faulkner 703). Even though she was thirty years old, she still had a...