Who Tells The Tale

Who Tells the Tale

An exploration into first person plural narrative form as used in "A Rose For Emily" by William Faulkner

Stories can do a wonderful thing, a transformative thing. They can enlarge us. Stories have the power, not only to entertain, but to increase our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Stories can help us understand how people act and why they act The first line of the short story, "A Rose For Emily" begins "When miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral" (425) In order to understand this story, and in that understanding allow it to work the magic of great literature upon us, it is imperative that we know who "our" refers to. "Our," the possessive form of we, is inclusive.

The line "Our whole town" immediately leads us to believe that the entire town is the narrator. The collective consciousness of the entire town somehow focused itself enough to relate this tale. But right away there is a problem. The narrator refers to reasons why the men of the town attended and then refers to the reasons why the women attended. If it were just this one instance we could ignore it and move on, but there are more. Later, the story refers to "People in our town" (428) This is an interesting thing then because the narrator makes clear that not every person in town is the narrator. There is a separation. If the "we" narrator had believed what the people believed, then the narrator would have simply used the pronoun "we" again, not "people." In line 30, the narrator refers to "the town," "The Town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks." (428) If the narrative form were first person singular, this self reference would be akin to Bob Dole referring to himself as Bob Dole in that annoying way of his.

Throughout the story, the narrator refers to the men or the women, to the town and to some people in the town. These are all examples of separation between the narrator and the people to which the narrator refers. If a story is written in first person singular, the narrator is one person, telling the tale about herself. If it is second person, then one tells, and one receives as in the narrative "you" You are walking up the stairs. Or as an epistle where the reader is an eavesdropper reading a letter from one person to another. Third person refers to him or her or they and draws a clear line between teller and characters and reader or witness. But the narrative "We" in "A Rose for Emily" is far trickier. The "we" is first person plural. Now we just need to figure out who is included and who is excluded. On our list of the excluded are "The Town" "The Men," "The women," the men who spread lime, the Aldermen, and all the individually referenced characters in the story. Who is left?

We can make a few assumptions about the narrator based on its knowledge. In paragraph fifteen, the narrator writes of Homer Barron "...and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her--had deserted her." (427)As we readers soon discover, the narrator is missing vital information. There is no foreshadowing here, the narrator simply does not know that Homer is dead. Yet, later in the story, "We did not say she was crazy then." (428) Is a deliberate piece of foreshadowing. Here the narrator lets us know that later on they will indeed think Miss Emily is crazy.

At other times, the narrator displays omniscient knowledge. "We" knows the exact placement of the words "For Rats" (429) on the package of poison. "We" knows the look and the feel and the depth of the dust inside Emily's house, and even how the light plays off of it. Even when no townsperson has been in the house, the narrator knows when the upstairs of the home was no longer in use and "we"