In what sense does the narrator's telling of the story serve as "A Rose for Emily"?

In William Faulkner's unusual and creepy short story, "A
Rose for Emily," the narrator speaks as a member of the community. He refers not to
himself as "I," but uses the pronoun "we" as if he is representing the opinions and
observations of the town. Roses can be symbolic of several things, and when searching
for meaning with a symbol, it is not difficult to find a connection, but we cannot
always know what the author's original intent was.

Sources
note that the rose is symbolic of devotion or intrigue. Both of these would apply. There
is a certain intrigue with regard to Miss Emily's behavior throughout the story,
especially when she buys rat poison, and again when Homer Baron enters her house—never
to be seen again. Emily's "devotion" to Homer is—deranged, however, and I doubt the town
is devoted to Emily, though they had a healthy respect for her—a "relic" of another
time.

In [Ancient]
Rome...

...a
wild rose on the door of a room where secret or confidential matters were
discussed...

…was like a "Do
Not Disturb" sign. There is definitely a great deal that goes on in secret within
Emily's house—almost everything. We can assume that Emily's servant, Tobe, is keenly
aware of this. When he escorts the first callers into the house after Miss Emily's
death, he continues out the back door and disappears.

At
funerals, a single rose is sometimes placed on the casket, and this could be a symbol of
love, respect or tribute. In this case perhaps the idea of tribute
is appropriate with the rose in the title and Miss Emily. She was a woman whose life was
controlled so strongly by her father that she never
married.

He
chases away Emily’s potential suitors because none of them are ‘‘good enough’’ for his
daughter.

When her father
passed, Emily was left a destitute spinster, for which the town could sympathize, or
more accurately for some, pity. We can infer that she languished under her father's
tight rein in that after he died, she defied his memory and social conventions by riding
out with the unmarried Homer Baron, a "Yankee" and someone not of her social
class.

There might be tribute perhaps, too, in the sense
that Emily lived her life as she chose, more like a man than a
woman; e.g., in the way she defied the town's "agents" when they came to collect her
taxes. On the other hand, it may be a tribute to a woman who
represented an older and disappearing sense of genteel society of the Old South
(although there is perhaps a hint of irony here: genteel ladies of the South did not
murder a lover and save the body). She is described at one point
as:

...dear,
inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and
perverse.

Maybe the town
should not have been surprised by Emily's murder of Baron: it had taken three days for
the authorities to convince her to let them bury her father so many years before—perhaps
some foreshadowing at a tinge of madness within her. After the community's initial shock
in finding Baron's dead body in Emily's bed, and her "iron grey
hair" on the pillow next to him, the townspeople might well have come to terms with even
Emily's obsession: she was a law unto herself in a male-dominated society, and lived
life as she saw fit. This, too, may have generated a need to pay some tribute to a woman
who survived so many years on her own, coming from uncertain and repressive
circumstances, and having the last word with all the "men in her
life."

The narrator telling her story, then, acts as a
tribute to Miss Emily.