Plot 1. A Rose for Emily

"One of us lifted something from it, and leaned forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair." pg. 289

The purpose of the structure of this story is to create suspense. If this had simply been told in chronological order, the suspense wouldn't have been as effective. To begin the story, Emily is depicted as a victim. She was hassled by the police and imprisoned by her father. So as a reader, I am thinking to myself, poor Emily, as do the people of her town. But, in the end we discover Emily isn't really so helpless. She is in fact crazy. Ironically, Emily turns out to be the so called villain. She has been storing a dead body in her house and laying with it night after night. I think that Emily's change in physical appearance, from thin and pretty to fat and ugly, alludes to the change in how the reader sees her. When Emily is young and beautiful, no one suspects she could be crazy or harmful, but as she begins to age and let herself go, the suspense of what she did begins to build. It is not until she loses all her beauty and youth that we see the true, insane Emily.