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"When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.”
From the very beginning of the text, the unnamed narrator makes it clear, through their use of first-person plural pronouns, that they speak for the town as a whole. Though no information is shared about the narrator specifically, we learn plenty about the town. This opening passage specifically introduces not just Emily but the town’s relationship to her—we learn that they viewed her as an oddity when she was alive, a subject of intrigue, and as a respected Jefferson institution, highlighting the dichotomy between Emily (the observed) and everyone else in Jefferson (the observers).
“Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.”
In this passage near the end of the story, the narrator uses not the collective we, but the more distant they, to refer to the townspeople as they force open the sealed door, which they refer to later as “violence.” It is notable that this occurs during an invasion of Emily’s privacy, suggesting the narrator, whoever they are, cannot bring themselves to endorse entering the locked room, knowing Emily would not have allowed it. The narrator reverts to we immediately after the break-in has concluded, but if the town waited until Miss Emily was “decently in the ground” to open the door as a show of respect, it’s clear the narrator isn’t buying it.
