"A Rose for Emily"

William Faulkner

While reading this passage I was really confused. I was confused because there were no explanations and many unanswered questions. This is a Southern tale of a young lady who has been sheltered most of her life. Emily’s father would not allow her to find a suitor and marry him. She lived a disclosed life. I am assuming that Emily had no suitable suitors because of her background and father. Emily appeared to be very respected in the small town in which she lived. The town’s people felt sorry for Emily because they would always say, “Poor Emily.” After her father passed away, she found her a suitor named Homer Barron. When she had gone to get the poison arsenic, I think she had intentions of keeping Homer as her suitor forever. My first thoughts were she was buying the poison to kill herself, but it turns out she murdered him. It raises the question that, “If you loved someone, why would you kill them?” My attention was directed to the passage that she had slept with his dead body for so long. There is no way I could have done that. I also could not imagine living somewhere that I could smell a rotting corpse. At the end, I was left in suspense about the gray hair left on Miss Emily’s pillow. This story left me hanging with some missing details.