A Rose For Emily Structure

"A Rose for Emily" is not a linear story, where the showtime event treated brings about the side by side, and and so on—rather, it is nonlinear, jumping back and along in time. Withal, there is a method to this temporal madness: the story opens with Miss Emily's funeral, then goes back in time, slowly revealing the key events of Miss Emily's life, before going back forward in time to the funeral. There, in the story's final scene, the townspeople discover in Homer's corpse and the strand of Miss Emily's hair the facts that make sense of all the events described before—for example, that Miss Emily bought arsenic from the druggist while in her thirties not to commit suicide as the townspeople suspected, but rather to murder her lacking sweetheart.

So, why does Faulkner structure his story like this? Toward the end of the story, its narrator makes a generalization well-nigh time that can be brought to carry on this question: for old people "all the by is not a diminishing route but, instead, a huge meadow which no wintertime ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow canteen-neck of the nigh recent decade of years." Looked at in this calorie-free, doesn't the non-linear nature of the story present the past it describes less as a "diminishing road" and more every bit a "meadow", in which ane might meander astern toward a glorified past? It is almost equally if the townspeople's nostalgia for the Former South, their desire to go back to a fourth dimension they remember or mythologize as better, infects their storytelling practices. Mayhap—at least for at present—it would be better if Jefferson got back onto the road of time, paved and lined with garages, and left their increasingly irrelevant social conventions in the dust. If simply the past had been a diminishing road for Ms. Emily, rather than a huge rose-colored meadow where merely corpses and the dust grow.

Time and Narrative ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Time and Narrative appears in each section of A Rose for Emily. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.

How often theme appears:

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Time and Narrative Quotes in A Rose for Emily

Below yous will find the of import quotes in A Rose for Emily related to the theme of Time and Narrative.

Information technology [the Grierson family unit business firm] was a big, squarish frame house that had one time been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, prepare on what had in one case been our near select street But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated fifty-fifty the august names of the neighborhood; just Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish disuse above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps…

Page Number and Commendation: 47

Explanation and Analysis:

She told them that her father was non expressionless. She did that for three days… We did not say she was crazy and so. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and nosotros knew that with zero left, she would take to cling to that which had robbed her, every bit people will.

Page Number and Citation: 52

Explanation and Assay:

…and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talk[ed] of Miss Emily every bit if she had been a gimmicky of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perchance, disruptive fourth dimension with its mathematical progression, as the old practice, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them at present by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Folio Number and Citation: 58

Explanation and Analysis:

For a long time nosotros but stood there, looking downward at the profound and fleshless smiling. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an comprehend, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers fifty-fifty the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.

Folio Number and Citation: 58-59

Explanation and Analysis:

Then we noticed that in the 2d pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from information technology, and leaning forrard, that faint and invisible dust dry out and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of irony-gray hair.

Page Number and Commendation: 59

Explanation and Analysis: