‘A Rose For Emily is a short story penned by William Faulkner that revolves around Emily Grierson, a woman born to a highly respected and wealthy Southern family. In this literary text, Faulkner manipulates the chronological sequence to characterize and cultivate the backstory of Emily as well as build a subplot that later ties into the main plot. The machination of time is a prevalent device in literature that authors generally apply to constitute a backstory for the protagonist. In this case, Miss Emily. What may seem like flashbacks in ‘A Rose For Emily’ is actually Faulkner’s approach to explain Emily’s seemingly odd behaviors and what caused her to become the character she is.
In the process of reading and comprehending time-manipulating literature, the reader forms convergence of details in the text to model his/her familiarity with reality. Although this method of time-complicity distorts the chronology of events, the reader recreates the order given the indications of textual structure. Considering this, the reader must be familiar with the ‘realm’ of events and texts preceding the reading of the literary text. For instance, in the respective text of ‘A Rose For Emily’, the story opens with Miss Emily’s funeral and then reverses into a description of Emily’s lifestyle. The story does not go in the temporal order of Emily’s life but transitions throughout. This overall loose framework of Faulkner’s composition consists of generalizations between the relation of the townspeople and Miss Emily. In addition, from a reader’s point of view it can be concluded that at the end of each section of the story ends with a reference to a character’s death: Sartoris’ demise (Chapter I), Emily’s father’s death (Chapter II), intention of poisoning (Chapter III), Emily’s death (Chapter IV), description of Homer Barron’s remains (Chapter V). All of this deduces the eventual downfall of the plot itself.
The mode of continuity in ‘A Rose For Emily’ allows literary text to bring distance in time by decades to proximity, and to return to the same matter multiple times, each time from a different tangent. The order of messages aim not to bring together the familiar order of events in the character’s life in accordance, but to characterize the person. For example, Emily’s purchase of poison occurred over a year after the beginning of the encounter with Homer Barron, a foreman from the North (Chapter III). However, Faulkner mentions no information prior to matters before Emily’s poison purchase. Through the aspect of what has been said in Chapter III, Homer Barron’s identity had been revealed and his love-affair with Emily continued till the townspeople call Miss Emily’s cousins from Alabama to put a stop to the romance. In the light of what has been said, Chapter IV goes over the same time period again, and the reader is informed about the scene of the poison purchase in chronological sequence. When Emily’s cousins leave the town and Homer Barron returns after leaving town (Chapter IV), what befalls him is not revealed until Chapter V. In the string of events, the narrator fails to mention the poison purchase in Chapter IV. Although, in Chapter III, it is indicated that the poison was bought during the cousins’ visit. This purchase is translated into Emily’s bold character and not just into suspicions arising from the plot.
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Faulkner unveils the past and present by depicting memories as flawed and abstract. The distortions of chronological order emphasize how and why the character goes insane. Moreover, an additional phenomenon which reinforces the narrative by means of text-continuum is the attitude of the townspeople towards Emily through their perspective. Overall, the perspective of the narrator (townspeople) and the reader are parallel in terms of situational irony. The author employs manipulation of time for the purpose of building intended impressions of Miss Emily and eventually transitioning the overall plot of the story.
