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A rose for emily
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Faulkner's structural problem in "A Rose for Emily" demanded that he treat all of Miss Emily's life and her increasing withdrawal from the community and that by extreme selection he give a unity, a focus to these conflicts. Thus he divided the story into five parts and based them on incidents of isolation and intrusion. These divisions have a perfect symmetry that is encountered often in the works of Hawthorne but seldom in those of Faulkner. The contrast between Emily and the townspeople and between her home and its surroundings is carried out by the invasions of her home by the adherents of the new order in the town. Each visit by her antagonists is a movement in the overall plot, a contributing element to the excellent suspense in the story, and a crisis in its own particular division of the story.
In youth Emily is not wholly separated from her somewhat sympathetic environment. In later life, however, she withdraws more and more until her own death again exposes her to the townspeople. In part one there is one invasion: after several notifications, the Board of Aldermen enter her home in a futile effort to collect her taxes. The second part describes two forced entrances into her isolation, both of them caused by a death. Four men cover her lawn with lime and break open her cellar door to sprinkle lime there, hoping to stop a terrible odor--though they are not aware that it is caused by the rotting corpse of her poisoned lover; the burial of her dead father, the purpos...
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