“The narrator in “A Rose for Emily” is different than others we have encountered. What term would you use to identify the narrator? is it a reliable narrator? Use evidence from the story to show why you say reliable or not.”

So in the story “A rose for Emily” I was mislead by who was actually telling/narrating the story. We don’t really get who is the narrator unless we look deeply in what kind of words are used through the passage. Depending on whose eyes we are looking through, the point of view can actually be a bit different. So before we get into that, lets take a look at “The Story of An Hour”, it is told in third person. It can also been seen as Third Person omniscient, but the narrator only knows how Mrs. Mallard is feeling and no one else, due to the fact that all other characters are “flat characters”. Now going back to “A rose for Emily”, it would seem that the story is definitely not told from Emily’s perspective. It is mostly told from other people’s point of view, and how the saw the situation unfold.  For Example

“When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows–sort of tragic and serene.”

“We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins.”

“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 strand of iron-gray hair.”

All of these quotes mentions the words “we” as in the people who either worked with her or saw her very frequently. We see the story through their eyes and through their thoughts. So due to that I kinda feel like the narrator is not that reliable. In the end of the story even after Emily’s death, we were told how “they” knew about there being “a room above the stairs which no one had seen in forty years” and that they saw a strand of gray hair. So after reading these quotes I am more inclined on saying that people who knew her quiet well and have been close to her were telling the story. The most reliable narrator would be First Person, or someone who is telling the story about themselves.