Time Jumps In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

The story is not easy to read and even harder to understand due to the many time jumps, one must take time and not rush the reading, in order to not miss important details. The narrative perspective is also unfamiliar: Faulkner uses an anonymous first-person narrator, who never appears in the first person singular, but is present as a “we” in a sense, I suppose one could therefore even speak of a we-perspective. Faulkner does not tell the story in a traditional order, this can be seen right from the start, from the fact that he begins, so to speak, with the end of the story: the death of Emily. Starting from the end, the narrator keeps making different flashbacks and leaps in time. It almost seems as if he time jumps, every time he remembers a new (old) detail/part of the story. An example for this is how he jumps from the city’s attempt to get Emily to pay taxes, yet suddenly we find ourselves reading about an episode taking place years prior: the city leaders are trying to fight off the smell of decay around Emily’s house (at that point in time the people did not know the horrible smell was from decay). These jumps make it somewhat difficult (yet also exciting) for the reader to reassemble the event in our minds.

I believe

He is by no means an admirer of Emily but has a split relationship with her. At first, he describes the ornate, old wooden house of the Griersons, which testifies as the last monument of the past splendor of the southern states. At the same time Faulkner characterizes the house resident Emily: a remnant of the old upper class, for whose obstinacy the narrator sometimes has sympathy. It is a relic in the midst of industrialized modernity with its cars and cotton factories. She is a victim of her stern father, who in a way is responsible for her turning in to the old maid she becomes known