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Situational Irony
Section 5
Explanation and Analysis:
What makes "A Rose for Emily" unique is that while many of its events seem fairly ordinary, they accumulate to form an uncanny, dark, and tragic story. One reason is because the story is told in a nonlinear fashion, in first person peripheral perspective. The narrator is a townsperson retelling Emily's story from their perspective. The narrator's limited perspective, as well as the story's non-chronological order, builds suspense and makes the reader wonder what is being left unsaid.
One example of the nonlinear style is found in the quote: “to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.” The story, being about Miss Emily, does not start at her birth, but rather her death. Because the reader already knows that Miss Emily is dead, her life can only be explored retrospectively. Thus her past is laid out for readers to scrutinize, speculate, and gossip on, just as the townspeople themselves have done. By retracing the steps that end with her death, the reader starts getting a feeling that there is something off about Miss Emily's life through her actions, secrecy, isolation, and refusal to change.
Gothic elements are another major stylistic choice. The accumulation of uncanny events in Miss Emily’s life creates a sinister feeling, as seen in this passage near the end of the story:
For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.
The way in which Faulkner parses through the layers of the macabre scene—starting with the nightshirt, then the bed, then the pillow and finally the dust—adds to its grotesqueness. Having this clear embodiment of gothic literature present at the story's ending confirms the reader's growing suspicions of Miss Emily.
Related Themes:
