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From the outset, “A Rose for Emily” is shaped by the collective voice of its unnamed narrator, about whom the reader knows nothing aside from the fact that they are one of the townspeople. Their use of the pronoun we characterizes their thoughts and experiences as being representative of the town, creating a distance between the reader and the story’s protagonist, Emily. The reader doesn’t gain any actual insight into Emily’s thoughts and feelings—we only see her through the subjective lens of the town’s residents, reducing Emily to little more than the object of their curiosity, scorn, and pity.
In a story as nonlinear as “A Rose for Emily,” it can be difficult to pinpoint plot elements, but the story's inciting incident is undoubtedly the death of Emily's father. Throughout her life, Emily was both protected and limited by her father, who, by refusing every one of her suitors, kept her isolated, and ensured he was all she had. This sheltering approach appears to have left Emily unprepared to process his death. Much of the story’s rising action is littered with examples of Emily’s inability to move forward: her refusal to bury her father, her insistence that new generations of town leaders honor Colonel Sartoris’s arrangement which exempts her from paying taxes, the crayon drawing of her father near the fireplace, her unwillingness to install a mailbox when the town gets free postal delivery.
The narrator describes the conflict that arose when Emily became involved with Homer Barron. The town viewed her behavior as improper, at first because she was a lady spending time with a man below her station and then because she was cavorting with a man, flaunting their relationship in public, when it seemed he had no plans to marry her. Emily’s behavior contradicted the town’s expectations, which in turn makes it clear to the reader that the townspeople were constantly watching, analyzing, and criticizing her. However, for all their vigilance, the town was unable to predict the nature of her instability. Their observations created a divide between themselves and Emily, just as it creates a divide between Emily and the reader, and it’s this divide that generates a level of suspense throughout the narrative, foreshadowing a gruesome revelation.
That Faulkner builds to this conclusion using flashbacks, revealed out of chronological order. We learn first that Emily has died, then that her father died decades prior, and that she was exempted from taxes at a certain point in 1894. We learn that a smell had emanated from her house two years after her father died. We learn that, before the smell but after her father’s death, she had become involved with a man and later purchased poison, and that prior to purchasing the poison the man in question had seemed unlikely to marry her, just before he disappeared. The time jumps allow Faulkner to portray the past and the present as coexisting, and in this way he is able to examine how they influence each other. The fractured timeline also parallels Emily’s fractured reality, revealing pieces of information that simultaneously explain how she came to be this way and instill in the reader a sense of dread.
The climax occurs just before the resolution. Returning to Emily’s funeral, as referenced in the beginning of the story, the narrator reveals that this, too, is a flashback, culminating in the breakdown of the sealed door and the discovery of Homer Barron’s decayed corpse. This is the final, grotesque manifestation of Emily’s instability and desperation to preserve the past. As the story resolves, the reader receives one final reveal—that there is a gray hair and the indentation of a head on the pillow beside Homer’s body, suggesting that not only had Emily kept the body, but had spent decades sleeping next to it.
