The Narrative Journeys In Faulkner's The Death Of Emily

The story is not easy to read and even harder to understand due to the many time jumps. The narrative perspective is also unfamiliar: Faulkner uses an anonymous first-person narrator, who never appears in the first person singular, but only as "we" occurs. One could therefore even speak of a we-perspective. The fact that Faulkner does not tell the story in a traditional order can be seen 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 thirty years prior: the city leaders are trying to fight off the smell of decay around Emily’s house. These jumps make it somewhat difficult (yet also exciting) for the reader to reassemble the event in our minds.

I feel that the narrator is on par with us as readers. It would seem that the narrator has no direct access to Emily's private life, he seems to depend on the few public appearances, and rumors. Often, one does not know if the narrator has been watching the narrated himself, or if he is retelling the story by means of the talk of the people that lived around Emily. If the chatter of the old in the city is a major source of narration, then the leaps in time become in a way more understandable. Gossip often comes with the price of untruth lying at its core, everyone having their own version of events, and embellishment often taking over the actual