Why does Faulkner use this particular narrator in "A Rose For Emily"?

The narrator in “A Rose for Emily” is a fascinating creation. It is the collective voice of the townspeople, sometimes admiring Emily, sometimes disliking her, and sometimes pitying her.

So why would Faulkner choose this unusual style of narration for the story? First, the ‘we’ pulls the reader into the story and creates a connection. In addition, the south is going through a period of great social change throughout Emily’s life. This collective town voice...

The narrator in “A Rose for Emily” is a fascinating creation. It is the collective voice of the townspeople, sometimes admiring Emily, sometimes disliking her, and sometimes pitying her.

So why would Faulkner choose this unusual style of narration for the story? First, the ‘we’ pulls the reader into the story and creates a connection. In addition, the south is going through a period of great social change throughout Emily’s life. This collective town voice can recognize, explain, and comment on it. At the beginning of the story, the narrator sounds young, but this collective voice goes all the way back three generations to Emily’s grandfather’s time. Emily is a throwback to a high social class that does not exist anymore in the New South. She holds herself above and apart from the town, who see her as “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation.” The townspeople both admire and resent her.

Because this narrator spans such a long time period and is not identified as male or female, we can see the change in society reflected by Emily and her relationship to the town. When the narrator talks about Colonel Sartoris remitting Emily’s taxes, it comments: “Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.”

The modern townspeople are not quite so gracious. They are glad when they discover Emily is left very little money because it takes her off her pedestal: “Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.”

The unique narrative voice in the story enables the reader to see the changes in southern society and attitudes over time as it reflects on the life of one of its preeminent citizens.