In addition to being unreliable because the narrator does not actually know Miss Emily or her life personally (rather, he learns everything of her through rumors and stories told by others), the narrator is unreliable because it seems that what has made Miss Emily especially notable is what was discovered about her after her death. The narrator does not feel compelled to tell her story prior to her death, seeing her only as a "tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town." The narrator does not even seem to think of her as a real person until she is dead. Only after her death and the discovery of the decayed body of Homer Barron do certain events in her life begin to take on real meaning.
While she lived, she was simply an idiosyncratic, anachronistic throwback to the Old South: a woman who used to be called a lady but who has completely lost touch with the world and changing times around her. Because the narrator tells the story knowing how it turns out—knowing what Emily has, apparently, done—it colors the telling of it.
In addition, the narrator—a first-person plural, "we"—seems to profess a rather intimate knowledge of events dating back even further than 1894, the year in which Emily's father died, which must be thirty or forty years prior to the end of the story. It is hard to believe that it is just one person who has all this information, and the notion of an entire group of people telling a reliable "truth" seems pretty far-fetched, as people tend to disagree. The plurality of the narrator also makes the speaker suspect.
As we soon discover upon reading the story, this is a town whose inhabitants habitually refrain from confronting the uncomfortable truth about Miss Emily Grierson. For the most part, the townsfolk live in an antebellum fantasy-world of Southern manners and fine gracious living. Anything that threatens to intrude upon this little world is to be ignored, even if it means living a lie.
In practical terms, this means that no one ever knows, or gets to know, the real Miss Emily. The local people have constructed their own myths about Miss Emily, who she is, and what she represents. They've put her on a pedestal, treating her as the last living link to a supposedly more glorious past. Being one of the townsfolk, the narrator cannot, then, give us anything more than a limited omniscience. He or she can only give us a partial account, as it's all that they—or anyone else in town—has ever had concerning Miss Emily.
The narrator of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is unnamed and seems to represent the whole town in which Miss Emily Grierson lived (we hear that she has died at the beginning of the story). The narrator could be considered unreliable because the narrator has seemingly had little to no actual interaction with Miss Emily. The information in the story is based on rumor, speculation, and observation. It does not appear that the narrator has ever had a conversation with Miss Emily, and we know the narrator (and the town at large) certainly has no real insight into Miss Emily's psychology. She is a mystery to the to town. They are interested in her and consider her like a "monument" that is an unquestioned part of the world in which they live. We know that the townspeople know very little about Emily's personal life by the fact that they find a dead body in a bed in her home after she dies. The body appears to be that of a former beau, Homer, who disappeared years before. The presumption is that she must've drugged him with the rat poison she buys in the store and kept him there, sleeping next to him for many years, as we see from the long gray hair found on the pillow next to his body. Everyone is shocked, including the reader, as we really did not know Miss Emily well and could not have predicted this bizarre behavior. The narrator relays rumors about Miss Emily throughout the story in a disorganized, non-chronological way. Ultimately, the narrator has to be considered unreliable, because he or she does not know Miss Emily personally. Through the use of the narrator, though, Faulkner is able to provide the reader with a truly surprising ending.
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