A Rose for Emily--William Faulkner

Leader--Loring
Analyst--Caroline
Recorder--Anne Catherine

Question 1 (Anne Catherine)
Do you think it's healthy for someone to become so attached to a person and fond of them that when the loved one dies, they refuse to believe that they are truly gone? In your opinion, did the repeating ideas of shutting others out, keeping to one's self, other means of reclusiveness, and the idea of obsessive nature over someone or something contributed to the appalling and unheard of murder that Miss Emily committed?
In my opinion, becoming so emotionally attached to a person can be very dangerous, especially when that person has to leave. Miss Emily tried hard to protect her father's body when he died, and then she loved Homer so much that she decided that she would keep him with her until she died. This is unhealthy because it led to Miss Emily's murdering of Homer and keeping his body, which is disturbing. Yes, Miss Emily's reclusiveness led her to being extremely secretive and also to refuse others' advice. 


Question 2 (Loring)
If Miss Emily loves Homer this deeply, how can she kill him? Does that not contradict the whole idea of love?


Question 2 (Caroline)

Why do you think that the author starts in the present in the beginning of the novel and then goes back into the past eventually ending up in the present again?
I think the author does it this way to keep people guessing when he sets up the story. Then when people really question the background of Emily, the community, and her personality, he gives the readers answerers to their questions. 




Analysis:

The authur uses similes to describe how old and reclusive she is
- "She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water."
- "Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand."
The author uses very unique sentence structer in the following quote.
- "They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years."
The following is a metaphor which really explains in great detail the thinking of the elderly.
- "...To whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches..."