William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

Often, you can tell more about an author by the stories they write, than anything the writer has left behind in interviews. "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner digs into his views on the masculine and feminine, class order and his own sense of sanity. The characters, narration and the temporal shifts illustrate more of Faulkner's mental troubles than Emily's.
The first male character the audience sees Emily connecting to is her father. The writer portrays him as an aggressive, arrogant man scaring men away from his daughter with horsewhips. It's clear that he has high expectations for Emily's future status. After his death, Colonel Sartoris does everything to maintain Emily's societal standing. These two men seem to bend – without question

He clearly shows the subject's class is perceived as higher by the older wealthy people in comparison to the townspeople. The writer seems to bounce between classism and being a victim of his time period. The only black character is referred to as a "manservant" (143) during the narration, while Homer's workers are called "niggers" (147). Despite the disrespectful name, Faulkner's telling of the story stresses the fact that he is the last person Emily trusts. When the town turns their noses down at Homer and his lower status, once again, Emily finds a confidant in him. As the community rejects her choices, she realizes that these two men are people she simply can't live without. With Faulkner's overt aversion to slavery, in spite of his confederate family, perhaps this was his only way of giving at least one subject of color a sense of dignity, while "look[ing] unflinchingly at that world's tragic flaw: the peculiar institution of slavery"

The temporal shifts within the story are enough to give the reader vertigo. The beginning of the story is actually the end, and each sentence has its own time zone. Dissecting the temporal shifts in Freudian psychology suggests the writer is untraditional and feels out of place. The only way for him to feel at ease seems to be to make the tale as chronologically disjointed as he is. If the reader takes the time to piece the adventure together - in its true order - they may get a glimpse into the mind of its author. The subject's ability to go years without any more human contact than a manservant and decaying corpse, is a projection of Faulkner's own antisocial