A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

AmbiguityOccurs in a literary work when some element of the work can be interpreted in
several different ways.
William Faulkner uses this technique in A Rose for Emily.

subtle hints or opencomments by the narrator

limited information about the true order, or sequence of events

vague details about Emilys actions
To help with understanding the story or clarifying the ambiguity, use the hint below as you read.
Hint: Recognize parts of the action, characterization, or description that the writer may have deliberately left
open-ended or even inconsistent. Then look for clues in the writing that help you make a logical interpretation.

Before you read the short story, read the information below on William Faulkner and take bulleted notes (at
least 10). Add the notes to the assignment that follows.

William Faulkner
(18971962)
For some writers, the place of their roots is a wellspring of story material. Oxford, Mississippi, was such a place for
William Faulkner. It became the basis for the imaginary world of Yoknapatawpha Countythe setting of many of his
novels and stories.
A Writers Roots Although Faulkner never finished high school, he read a great deal and developed an interest in writing
from an early age. In 1918, he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps and was sent to Canada for training. However,
World War I ended before he had a chance to see combat, and he returned to Mississippi. A few years later, longing for
a change of scene, Faulkner moved to New Orleans. There, he became friends with author Sherwood Anderson, who
offered encouragement and helped get Faulkners first novel, Soldiers Pay, published. In 1926, Faulkner returned home
to Oxford, Mississippi, to devote himself to his writing.
A Gold Mine of Inspiration In what he called his own little postage stamp of native soil, Faulkner uncovered a gold
mine of inspiration. So compelling and complex was this source of inspiration that Faulkner decided to create a
cosmos of my ownthe fictional county of Yoknapatawpha. From Oxford, Faulkner wrote a series of novels about the
decay of traditional values as small communities became swept up in the changes of the modern age. He saw immense
dramas acted out in his small, rural town, and he used jumbled time sequences, stream-of-consciousness narration,
dialect, page-long sentences, and other difficult techniques to show what he called the human heart in conflict with
itself.
A Slow Spread of Recognition For many years, Faulkner was dismissed as an eccentrican unimportant regional writer.
Gradually, however, critics began to take him seriously. Today, Faulkner is generally considered the most innovative
American writer of his time.
Experimenting With Narration The novel that first earned him critical acclaim was The Sound and the Fury (1929), a
complex book exploring the downfall of an old southern family as seen through the eyes of three brothers, one of whom
suffers from severe mental retardation. A year later, Faulkner published As I Lay Dying, the story of a poor familys sixday journey to bury their mother. Told from fifteen different points of view and exploring peoples varying perspectives
of death, the novel was a masterpiece of narrative experimentation. Other innovative works followed,
including Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which is told by four speakers offering different interpretations of events.

Hollywood Years To earn money during the 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner wrote screenplays in Hollywood. Many of the
films he worked onincluding Gunga Din (1939), To Have and Have Not (1945), and The Big Sleep (1946)have become
classics of the American cinema.
In some of Faulkners later works, such as The Unvanquished (1938) and The Hamlet (1940), he returned to a more
traditional style. Yet in these novels, Faulkner continued developing the history of Yoknapatawpha County and its
people.
Despite the critical success of his fiction, Faulkner did not earn widespread public recognition until 1946, when The
Portable Faulkner was published. Four years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize following the publication of Intruder
in the Dust (1948), a novel in which he confronted the issue of racism. The narrative techniques he pioneered continue
to challenge and inspire writers today.

Read A Rose for Emily

After reading the short story, answers the following questions. Type your answers in MLA
format.
1. In the first paragraph of the story, we see that Faulkner uses a first person plural narrator. Why do you think
Faulkner prefers this? How does this affect your understanding of the story?
2. What could Miss Emilys house represent? Comment on the narrators description of the house in the first and
the fifth paragraphs.
3. What does the fathers portrait, as mentioned in the fifth paragraph, represent? Does the narrator mention
about the portrait anywhere else in the story? If yes, in what ways could this be significant?
4. What could Miss Emilys ticking watch symbolize? What does it tell us about Miss Emily? How does the watch
contribute to our understanding of the themes of the story?
5. What was your reaction when you read the final sentences of this story?
6. What does the story say about Homer Barron and his relationship with Emily? What probably happened to
Homer, and why?
7. What values do you think are important to Emily? What do you think of Emilys values? Explain.
8. Which event in A Rose for Emily did you find most ambiguous? What interpretation of this event do you think
the text supports? Explain.
9. How does the ambiguity add to the literary quality of A Rose for Emily?
10. What qualities in A Rose for Emily relate to the Modernism literary movement? Explain.