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In Faulkner's most widely anthologized story, "A Rose for Emily," the narrator is as important to plot as Emily Grierson. Using the first-person plural 48 times (Kempton 106), he speaks, as most interpreters of the story agree, for the town of Jefferson and the South in general during the early decades of the twentieth century (Jones 115). In fact, he represents the real protagonist of the story, which is white southern society. As we shall see, his relationship with Emily is at least as important as her relationship with her former lover, Homer Barron, who was, in a sense, a rival to the town and the South. The relationship between Emily and the narrator (and the society he represents) is symbiotic: imaginatively, neither can exist, as is, without the other. In this and other respects, the narrator and Emily are foils.
By entering a love affair with Homer Barron, Emily briefly rebelled against southern values and then, by ending her affair with him, at least as far as the townspeople were concerned, she conformed again to those values. She killed Homer largely to placate society, although that, in her deranged mind, also secured him as her lover forever. At the conclusion of the story, this killing is eclipsed in the imagination of readers by evidence of some sort of necrophilia.
The way the story is told is determined by the narrator. In the process of telling it, he implies his own and his society's cultural values, which influence attitudes and behavior toward Emily in a way that implicates him and the townspeople in her fate. The reader might well wonder why he tells the story at all or why he tells it the way he does, although, to my knowledge, these questions have not been asked in print. There is good reason to surmise that he narrates in order to hide his and his neighbors' collusion in the killing of Homer Barron.
The narrator and other townspeople did not, of course, anticipate Homer's killing, but, as we shall see, they did supply the motive. They also had to have known about the killing soon afterward. And they condoned the killing by not publicly acknowledging it and by not investigating in order to prosecute the killer,...