The first thing I noticed from the main character of this prose, Emily Grierson, is that she lacks human affection and contact. No man is an island, so if a man tried to live by himself without anybody, isolation and loneliness would soon take over his mind and body which could cause him to do crazy things. Just like in this prose set in Jefferson, Mississippi, Emily grew up as an introvert who never had any suitors because her manipulative father thwarts every men who tried to get to know Emily. So when Homer Barron came to her life and showed her what it feels like to be dating and going out on Sunday afternoon drives, Emily decided to kill Homer Barron by poisoning him with arsenic so that he will never have to leave her side. It was a desperate act. Emily kept his corpse locked up for forty years in her house, and we can conclude that she even laid with him every night, as observed from the story that the corpse was in an attitude of embrace when it was found. Emily could possibly developed necrophilia. It was all gore and gothic, but the end seemed to be presented as a bitter sweet tragedy. People do crazy things out of love, and it is no wonder Emily did it to Homer Barron so that she could preserve the presence of the first man who gave her a sense of love, security, and comfort. We will never know what went on to Emily’s mind, and we will never know what she did from all those days and years that she locked herself up in that house. I liked the fact that the story was narrated in a neighbor’s point of view, leaving the readers with sheer curiosity on what is happening inside Emily’s house and what her true intentions are. I guess Faulkner decided to leave it to us — if we would judge Emily’s action according to what we can see or if we would judge her with pure consideration given that she may have suffered from a mental illness. Either way, we live our lives differently, and each of us have a different story to tell in which other people may or may not know. We will never know what are their reasons for doing this or that, so the best thing we could do is to just shut up and refrain from criticizing other people’s decisions because we have no idea what is going on in their minds.
