The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once laid in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strain of iron-gray hair.

*

Above is the strange and somewhat mysterious ending to A Rose For Emily. Although we now understand the smell, the buying of the arsenic and what happened to Homer Barron, we are left with the description of a room, arranged by who we can assume was Miss Emily, that is in likeness to an art exhibit dedicated to the metaphysics of love and death. The "long sleep that outlasts love," appears to have decomposed Miss Emily's sanity as well as the body of her former lover. The indentation of the head on the second pillow seems to say that she might of habitually lied by his corpse, pretending that everything hadn't gone so wrong in her life. She wanted to restore an idea of glory in the aristocracy of the south and the tomb she kept was a last ditch effort.

Emily's father would not have approved of her marrying a yankee, so she didn't, she killed one. The love, like Emily's hopes for a life fulfilling the expectations of her family, looks to have died with both of them. Barron's body was in the "attitude of an embrace," but now, like the house Emily lived in in, time has warped everything into the pose of decay itself. How does Faulkner describe the house, the town, the character Emily (her physical and mental manias), and what do you think it might mean in a more general argument? Do you think that the murder and exhibition of the body really has philosophical implications or is Faulkner not offering a symbolic representation of the South? Is the story purely aesthetic - or does Faulkner have more to say?

*

-grayson