A rose for emily

If the story were to change from first person plural to first person singular by Tobe or Homer, a lot of the subtleties in the story involving Emily’s life would become clearer. The biggest change to the story is the addition of all the details and events that would have happened over the course of Emily’s life. Since Emily so secretive, we can only infer so much about her story from the account of the townspeople, who barely even know her personally. If we see through the eyes of her lover, who is homer, we’ll get to see much more of the intimacy between the characters and what went wrong in their relationship. If we see through the eyes of Tobe, we get to see a little less of the relationship since he isn’t as involved in the story as Homer is. However, Tobe’s story would probably be more reliable since he isn’t directly involved with Emily’s love life but he does get to see what’s going on inside the house. Therefore, Tobe’s account of the story would reveal more about Emily’s life than the first person plural point of view but less than Homer’s point of view in the story. However, since we’ll seeing through the eyes of one character that happens to be more involved in the story’s plot, we’ll also get information that is skewed because of the character’s biases or beliefs. The events that unfold in the story thus because less reliable since we cannot trust the character to tell the truth or present information in an unbiased manner. The townspeople on the other hand are merely spectators and take almost no part in the story. Therefore, they have little reason to lie or be biased. I think writing this story from a different point of view would change the theme of this story because some of the important information in the story is lost when we see through the eyes of Tobe or Homer. For example, Tobe might not have known about the murder and Homer might have been largely unaware of what is in store for him. In the first plural point of view, it is clear that Homer is murdered and that Emily’s killing of Homer is premeditated. Thus, Faulkner gives only enough information so that the readers can fill in the blanks and determine the theme of the story for themselves.