"A Rose for Emily"

"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 manservant- a combined gardener and cook- had seen in at least ten years." (pg 281).

How could you start a story better than by explaining the funeral of the supposed main character and how no one cared for her?  I must say, this story had a very annoying structure to it because of how it was ordered so haphazardly, and in no recognizable chronology. I'm not actually sure that there is a word to describe the structure of this story, but it appears to be broken down into five anecdotes of Emily's life which inevitably characterize Emily as... crazy?  The point of view left me very confused on what all happened and who all died, but this reflects Emily's personality.

We both know that I could not fully explain the craziness of the structure if I did not refer to the last paragraph also.  By this point in the story I had learned a lot about Emily's personality and life.  For example, not only did her father die, she also killed her servant- I think?  She bought arsenic, but she didn't die... yeah, let's say she killed her servant, Homer.  (I just read question 9 again and now know she killed Homer.)  The structure of the story made her seem like she was crazy because of genetics, but the last paragraph, as was a nice trend with these stories, completely negated my entire understanding of the story.

Better late than never?

Anyways, she laid in bed next to her dead father!  She was not crazy because of how society treated her, but because of how much she loved her father.  The narrator easily could have introduced these minor details when they talked about how the law almost got involved, but instead structured it so that Emily came off even more depressed and unstable, while the whole time she was really just sad.

Now I feel sad.

By the way, "iron-gray hair" is really just white.