What is the significance of the hair on the pillow in a rose for emily

If you want, you can read the plot summary on the Wikipedia page. I will identify the plot points I think are important for my analysis, but will assume the reader is familiar with the story.

The story has many layers to it, technical, literary, and symbolic. For example, on a technical level, Faulkner mostly uses the interesting first person plural point of view. Perhaps this is meant to imply that a single person from the town is telling the story as an old yarn for a passerby on behalf of the rest? But we are never told who this narrator is or what their actual role is in the story.

They seem to be in on every detail of the plot in an omniscient way that no single person could realistically know. In any case, this point of view does add a layer of abstraction for me, anyway. Another technical twist is how Faulkner really gets us turned around with the timeline. This type of non-linear plot seems natural in the telling as if it were told from the collective memory of the entire town. In fact, the timeline has even been analyzed by computer algorithms to find inconsistencies.

The story is about a woman who killed her lover years ago and has been sleeping with his dead body. Symbolism is an excellent way to help the reader understand certain parts of a story. William Faulkner understands this. Once a person starts to read this story, the rose becomes apparent in its meaning. The rose is the biggest symbol in this story. Miss Emily is willing to do anything, and by anything, I really do mean anything, to keep Homer Barron around for the rest of her life.

Faulkner, William. Kennedy X. New York: Longman, A Rose for Emily. Plot Summary. Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Section 4 Section 5.

LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Up to the day of her death at seventy four it was still that vigorous iron-grey, like the hair of an active man.

The weight gain and gray hair are signs of depression. The town ignores her problems and only comes to understand the depth of her psychological trauma after she dies. So, a group of men sneak around her house one night, sprinkling lime around her foundation. The gray hair on the pillow indicates that she has been lying down on the bed, beside the corpse of her dead former fiance.