In most traditional works of literature, the existence of narration is both a crucial and mandatory element in order to fulfill the writer’s purpose. Such works of literature include short stories and novels. The importance of the narrator goes beyond the act of simply telling a story that happens in a specific place at one particular point in time. Through the course of the years, famous writers have used the narrator as a tool to create suspense and force the audience to read the story from a specific point of view.
Within this group of writers, William Faulkner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman have used the narrator to allow the reader to interpret the story from a desired point of view. Faulkner achieves this by using first person narrator in his short story “A Rose for Emily” to portray the story of Emily Grierson. A woman from the nineteenth century whose darkest secrets are revealed after she dies. Similarly, Gilman makes use of the first person narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” to portray the story of Jane, who allegedly suffers from postpartum depression and creates an obsession with the yellow wallpaper in her room.
However, how reliable are these narrators? Unreliable narrators are used on purpose by writers to make the reader believe that there is an alternate point of view of the story. Its main purpose: to question the credibility of the events that happen within the story and create suspense and intrigue in the reader in order to find the truth behind it. In “A Rose for Emily” we become spectators of what begins being a speculation of events prior to Emily’s death.
The narrator begins introducing the fact that Emily has passed away, but there is still a lot of speculation about her mysterious life “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”(Faulkner, 1). Faulkner chooses to reveal Emily through the eyes of whom regards her to be the most important character in the story.
According to Ruth Sullivan “A Rose for Emily” is first-person narration, hence subject to the questions one usually puts in understanding such a story. For instance, who is the narrator and what is his relationship to the main action? Why did the author choose this particular narrator for this particular story? (Sullivan, 159). From the introduction in the story, it is possible to make the assumption that the narrator might be one of Emily’s neighbors who somehow has witnessed every single event as narrated in the story.
Despite this assumption it is not clear whether he/she is a close neighbor or a complete outsider as he/she remains in anonymity during the whole plot. It is also possible to state that the narrator becomes close to being objective due to his anonymity during the story. It is also possible to state that the narrator becomes close to being objective due to his anonymity during the story. Kenneth Payson Kempton, calls the narrator “an ‘extreme of anonymity’ who comes close to being totally objective” (Sullivan, 159).
With this claim, Kempton tries to describe a narrator that, to his criteria “is some unidentified neighbor of the protagonist, stands at the farthest possible position from the heart of the story and still is within it… somebody who sees and hears what goes on without more than average powers of interpretation and analysis and who is in touch with the surface facts only, and therefore whose discovery of what lies beneath the surface can pace the reader’s discover” (Sullivan, 159).
This suggests that at some point, the narrator might adopt an objective point of view, since he speaks in the plural form “we”, hence meaning that the narrator might not be just one neighbor but many at the same time represented in one voice. Even though his speech attributes him some innocence, it is clear that such narrator is not familiar with “surface facts only because he tells Miss Emily’s story after the town has broken into her room and therefore after they all know her secrets” (Sullivan, 160). This suggests that the narrator is more deeply involved than just being merely a spectator in the story.
Sullivan implies that the narrator is a tool to build irony and suspense. Wayne C. Booth stated in his book “The Rhetoric of Fiction” that he called “a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not”(Booth, 158-59). Taking Booth’s statement and the role of the narrator in Faulkner’s short story, it is possible to tell that the narrating voice does not pace the audience’s discovery deeper that what is said at a superficial level due to the fact that the story is not developed in a chronological order.
Thus the objectivity of the narrator seems to change at this point even though it still remains anonymous. Was Faulkner really trying to be objective? Or did he choose this specific narrator to include the reader into his hypothetical audience. It seems that the author chose a voice with the “authoritarian power to mislead the reader to take statements and accept them as truth (Sullivan, 160)”.