This statement is made by the narrator in "A Rose for
Emily" in connection to Emily's reaction to her father's death. In the preceding
passage, the narrator explains that when Emily's father died and the town's women went
to call on her, she wasn't wearing mourning and didn't look sad and denied that he was
dead. The narrator goes on to say that three days later Emily finally broke down in
grief and that the town representatives rushed off with the body to bury it. The
narrator follows this explanation with the quote in
question:
We
did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the
young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have
to cling to that which had robbed her, as people
will.
What the narrator is
suggesting is that because Emily's father had been so sever with her and so unyielding
to her desires and hopes, it was normal for her to cling to him since people react to
oppressors with inexplicable devotion. The townspeople all knew what kind of overbearing
and hostile father he had been and could understand Emily's extreme reaction to her
father's death. As a result, they did not think she was crazy. The wording of this
observation, "We did not say she was crazy then," implies another, later, occasion on
which they did think she was crazy. This foreshadows--sets up the anticipation and mood
of--the shocking ending that reveals that Emily must now be called crazy because the
dead Homer, found in Emily's bedroom after hre own death, was a skeleton laying in her
bed.
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