Sympathy for Killers: Faulkner and Bierce's Complex Protagonists

Introduction: Challenging Reader Sympathy

In works of fiction, sympathetic characters traditionally perform heroic actions, while unsympathetic ones do decidedly less admirable things. Given that humans are highly judgmental creatures, authors have long tried to challenge reader perceptions by creating plots in which characters who perform unspeakable acts are arguably the most compelling figures in the piece. It is difficult to see a murderer in anything other than a negative light. In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", both authors create protagonists who are killers, yet who are developed enough that the reader cannot dismiss them as mere murderers. Instead, readers are challenged to examine the events surrounding each crime and make their own moral determinations.

Emily Grierson's Isolation and Mental Instability

William Faulkner's 1930 short story "A Rose for Emily" tells the story of the death of a small Southern town's most prominent elderly woman: Miss Emily Grierson. In the opening sentence, the narrator informs the reader that everyone in the town attended her funeral — "the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house" (Faulkner 1). This is because no one had been inside Emily Grierson's home in a decade, and the woman herself had barely left it. Emily was profoundly lonely in life, with no friends, and those who attended her service were there not to mourn but to gawk and gossip. She lived completely isolated from the world, except for an old Black man who worked as her servant.

Emily Grierson clearly suffers from agoraphobia, as well as a range of other psychological conditions. Most notably, she lives as though she were permanently fixed in the past. The first indication of this appears when the sheriff comes to collect her taxes. Under the old social order, she had never been required to pay them and saw no reason to begin. Her invocation of the deceased Colonel Sartoris effectively ends the men's pursuit of payment. Emily had always been able to vanquish anyone who would challenge her elevated position in the town: "She vanquished them, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell" (Faulkner 3). This reference to a mysterious smell foreshadows the story's revelation that the sweetheart who supposedly abandoned Emily years ago was, in fact, killed by her.

Emily's Crime and Psychological Escape

The acrid odor of decomposition can be smelled from the street and eventually draws the attention of the police. Being Miss Emily, however, she easily dismisses their inquiries. The men themselves, rather than confront the town's most prominent citizen, take it upon themselves to deodorize the outside of Emily's home with lime (Faulkner 4). The fact that Emily lives amid the putrid stench without apparent distress demonstrates the depth of her mental instability. She is lost in her own mind, dwelling in a time before she was abandoned — and therefore before she became a killer. To her, life remains as it was before she murdered her lover, a conclusion supported by the horrifying detail that she had been sleeping beside his corpse for decades.

The Southern Gothic tradition to which Faulkner belongs frequently uses grotesque imagery and psychological decay to expose the darker currents beneath genteel Southern society. Emily's condition is both a personal tragedy and a symbol of a culture clinging desperately to a vanished past.

Conclusion: Moral Complexity in American Fiction

Emily Grierson was guilty of murdering her lover and keeping his body beside her for more than thirty years. Farquhar was guilty of treacherous acts against the Northern army. Each was a killer and might reasonably be considered reprehensible. Yet it is difficult for a thoughtful reader to judge either of them too harshly. One cannot help but feel sorry for the wronged and isolated Miss Emily, nor for a man who believed he was doing the right thing for his country. Their acts were illegal and, by modern moral standards, clearly wrong — but throughout history, many have killed for love and many more have killed for country. Faulkner and Bierce masterfully illuminate the moral quandary that such situations create, inviting readers to ask whether they themselves could be capable of similar actions under comparable circumstances.