When readers read A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, they get to question 'Why did Emily do such a terrible deed in the end?' Like a detective novel, by setting the narrator as 'we', the town`s people detect the reasons of Emily`s eccentric behavior in a detailed perspective. They think the reason for Emily`s eccentric behavior is based on the death of Emily` father, the fear of losing someone she loves again and the absence of the town`s people who Emily can rely on.
To begin with, the narrator reveals that the death of Emily`s father takes up a big part of Emily`s eccentric behavior by arranging the order of the events. The setting of the first part, which is Emily's funeral, tells that the novel is not arranged in time order. Later, it goes back to the time when her father died, and the stream of time is changed at this event, and goes forward to where Emily`s funeral is held in again. In other words, the death of Emily`s father is the center of the novel in the construction of the novel, and it tells that her father`s death is the underlying reason why she did terrible deed indirectly. .
Moreover, since Emily had no family members like her mother or her siblings, her father's influences were absolute. In the novel "her father had driven away all the young men ", she never acts against her father. Emily`s father, who was described as "a spraddled silhouette, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip " was the only person Emily could cling to in the whole world. So, it is not eccentric that she refused to give her father`s dead body to the town`s people. Even after his death, she kept "a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father before the fireplace " like her emotional anchor. That is to say, her father`s death means that her world where she established an exclusive and dependent relationship with her father "broke down. " .
After the death of her only affection, her father, her target of affection switches to Homer Barron.