"The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish-this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believes he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood."
William Faulkner is an author whose writing is notable for a variety of reasons: most of his fiction is set within the same fictional county in his home state of Mississippi with the additional interesting element that most of his stories are populated by members of a couple of family lineages who tend to interact across multiple generations. The one thing for which Faulkner’s fiction is most famous is his complex sentence structure. The point of such a long sentence—especially when placed at the beginning of a story as in this example—is to seduce readers into the moment by coercing them into paying close attention. This is a story about a boy maturing into something closer to manhood and it is a tale told with complexity. Faulkner is sending a signal with this opening that if one is not prepared to scrutinize the tale closely, then it will wind up being nothing more than a story about burning a barn.
"The body had apparently once lain 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."
“A Rose for Emily” is certainly among Faulkner’s most well-known and intensely analyzed short stories. Coming at the end of the story, the passage above fulfills all the promises created by the preceding creepiness and a sense of foreboding relentlessly pushing through the sad tale of Miss Emily. It is here that the Southern Gothic elements finally climax as the truth explodes in the last three paragraphs. What makes this imagery all the more gruesome and valuable as a seminal example of the essential quality of the grotesque which characterizes Southern Gothic is that there is still just one more paragraph to go before the story finally concludes on a note of almost pure horror.
"You mean to tell me that you'd take a nigger's word before a white woman's? Why, you damn niggerloving—”
The N-word pops up more than fifty times over the course of Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner. There is no point in denying that this fact makes it a tough read. It is also worth noting, however, that what was at the time the far more preferential term “Negro” shows up well more than twice as often. Even the simplicity of describing a character as a “black man” makes it into the discourse twice. There is another point to be made that the word is being used by a character in dialogue, not as part of the narration. In fact, though the word pops up ten times over the course of this particular story, it is never used in the narration, not even once. Making this all the more significant is that the story is being told by a first-person narrator. This is significant because it demonstrates that the narrator is not the type of person to use that word, but his story is one populated by many who are not bothered in the least with its casual use in conversation. The lack of use in narrative exposition juxtaposed with the abundant use in conversation is the whole point.
