Who Is The Narrator In "A Rose For Emily?"

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Throughout Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", confusion arrises in the minds of readers as to who exactly is narrating the story. It becomes a mystery in which close attention must be paid to each detail in order to unmask the identity of the voice within the story. The narrator speaks third person in an unusual way; it is as if the one voice represents a multitude of voices. The narrator echoes the thoughts and feelings of the people in the entire town as if the town shared one mind about Miss Emily, "Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town..." (426). Here one can notice that it isn't just the narrator's point of view on Miss Emily voiced, rather the whole town's perspective on her. Another peculiar characteristic about the speaker is that the voice seems to be genderless, that is, readers are unable to gain a clear depiction on whether the narrator is a male or female: "None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such...The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom," (428). Shown in this section, the narrator can neither be seen as a man nor as a woman due to the mention of "the young men" and "the ladies". The voice is given no clear gender, rather a representation of both groups and again of the entire town as a whole. "A Rose for Emily" begins during the present time and guides readers through a series of flashbacks to the past sharing Miss Emily's history. Because Miss Emily is known as a town "tradition", her heritage has been passed down through many generations. This causes readers to view the narrator as unreliable due what information may or may not be false, added on to the story, bias, or maybe even forgotton in time. This brings up an important question, which generation is the narrator from? How does
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