Is A Rose For Emily Reliable

Emily Grierson, the formerly wealthy bachelorette from a family of gentry, is portrayed through the second most unreliable lens, with the first being herself. Her actions throughout the story display a mind not all there, with her refusal to admit her fathers death and the murder of her lover Homer Barron. “A Rose For Emily,” a short story written by William Faulkner, is set in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s in a small southern town. It recaps the life of a reclusive Miss Emily whose trials and tribulations are often talked about among the people who live near her. Although all stories about Emily are accounts of gossip from the townspeople, which inherently are unreliable, the narrator builds credibility through various stories and memories

However this makes the narrator seem credible, it actually is not reliable. After Miss Emily’s purchase of arsenic, the townspeople said “She will kill herself,” (Faulkner 696) because unbeknownst to them, she was planning to kill Homer. The assumption the townspeople made is relatable, because, in social groups where one person is mysterious, others will make assumptions and gossip about them. The curiosity of the townspeople towards Miss Emily brings the reader into the story and makes them curious as well. After Miss Emily's death, the true expanse of this curiosity is shown. Faulkner writes “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection …, the women …to see the inside of her house, which no one …had seen in at least ten years'' (Faulker 692). Even in Miss Emily’s eventual death, she had isolated herself from the rest of the town to the point that no one knew what her house looked like on the inside. The townspeople's accounts of her are few and far between, and the things they say about her are speculation. This does mean that the narrator is not truly reliable, however, you are led into a sense of trust because the townspeople all hear the stories and believe them. The use of gossip has a profound effect of a feeling of closeness to the townspeople and separates Miss Emily from the