"A Rose for Emily": A Preservation of the Past

In "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner, the candidly repugnant yet deceptive tones convey an ambiguous façade that Emily and the aristocratic South possess with their persistent preservation of the idealistic, but unreasonable lifestyle with the use of diction, detail and syntax. Faulkner's use of diction illustrates the obsession that Emily has for the romantic life that she imagines in an attempt to hyperbolize the desperate restoration of the dilapidated South. …

…the reader into thinking and feeling one way and then Faulkner stuns the audience without any noticeable preparation. Faulkner's multiple use of the idea of a façade creates a foggy vista of the town of Jefferson all throughout the story and effectively conceals the hidden motives that Emily and the South had in creating a fantasy of something that died in the past but resurrecting it and preserving it for the present.