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A Rose Of Emily Timeline Analysis

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Chapter One
The Plot Construction
1.1 The Multiple Time Shifts
One thing that makes A Rose of Emily such a classic novel is Faulkner’s use of fractured time line. The story is written in five parts; each one gives certain details about the mysterious Emily Grierson. Faulkner set a trick to his readers; the arrangement of the event is not chronologically presented, making the reading an efforts-worth task.
Chronologically, in the first section, you are given the time 1894 when the government paid Emily’s taxes. In the second section, the smell issue is 30 years before the new government come to get Emily to pay the taxes. It is a short time after Homer’s disappearance and is two years after her father’s death. She was about thirty then. In the third section, After Her father‘s death, Homer Barron come to the town, she goes out with him. Her cousin comes. She buys arsenic. In the fourth section, Homer disappears after entering Emily’s house. We learn that Emily dies at the age of 74. The last section mainly describes the dead body of Homer and the iron-grey hair. However, if the story is arranged in this order, it wouldn’t be a masterpiece in American literature. Faulkner rearranges the order of the whole events and reader’s efforts are needed to make …show more content…

It is the perspective from which a narrator or writer recounts a narrative or presents information. Depending on the topic and purpose, it contains the first-person point of view, the second-person, or the third person. It has once been compared to a camera: “When you are reading a scene in a book and when you are writing a scene, you follow the character almost like a camera on the character 's shoulder or in the character 's head. You are looking at the character performing a specific set of actions or important actions in vivid detail.”（Jenna

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Emily’s Mental Deterioration After getting over the initial shock of finding out that the mysterious woman that everyone was talking about was going to sleep each night with a decaying body next to her, it makes sense for the reader to question her mental state. If the reader took a closer look at the town’s description of her, they will realize that as time went on, Emily’s will power began to deteriorate. When she was young, she was the topic of everybody’s conversation, however, she did not let that bother her and walked down the streets with her head held high. Emily took over the old house after her father’s death and kept a few servants around to keep the house tidy, nonetheless, the outside of the house was not kept in the best of conditions.

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Paloma Cerda Mrs. Koehler ENGL-1301-566 September 20, 2017 In A Rose for Emily written by William Faulkner, the story of Miss Emily is told through a very loose format. Through this narration, there is a long and drawn out suspense built up through little hints left by the reader without fully giving away the dark truth behind Emily and her house. Until the end of the story, the narrators ambiguity cleverly points the reader towards the climax of the story where Emily is discovered to be Homer Barron’s killer. This ambiguous element is important to the quality of this short story as it drives it forward and keeps the reader interested.

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Faulkner provides another example of foreshadowing as the narrator discloses that Homer Barron was last seen entering Miss Emily home. Miss Emily exerted a possession over Homer Barron and with the first signs of abandonment and disapproval, she became controlling just as her father did, ensuring she would not be left alone once again in her lifetime. This is when Miss Emily resorts to arsenic to poison Homer Barron, securing him by her side, preventing desolation and loneliness once more in her

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Not only that, as Homer becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, it scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station. Even though Emily is from the high class family, it does not mean that she is living up to the pleasant lifestyle. As a matter of fact, she is actually living a gloomy and desolate life, which is essentially the opposite lifestyle expected for Emily's rank in society by the townspeople. Although Emily once represented a great southern tradition centering on the landed gentry with their vast holdings and considerable resources, Emily's legacy has devolved, making her more a duty and an obligation than a romanticized vestige of a dying order.

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As he walks in, Josephine screams and falls down dead; the happiness that she had felt was too much for her weak heart. Likewise, “A Rose for Emily,” written by William Faulkner, opens on a woman, Emily Grierson, except this time the woman is already dead. The story is told from the perspective of the townspeople, a collective “we.” They recount when she was exempted from her taxes, and then when she refused to pay them after the death of the person who remitted her. Then, the townspeople go back further to a time when Emily’s house had a stench so foul, a judge was consulted about what to do; it was decided that a few townspeople would stealthily sprinkle lime about her property in order to not confront her and seem discourteous.

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An epiphany is a moment of insight or sudden realization of something. In the story, "A rose for Emily" by William Faulkner I experienced what I would consider an epiphany at the end of the story when the narrator says, " Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head" and then a few lines later, " we saw a strand of iron gray hair" (316). Throughout the story the narrator used small symbols such as the condition of the house saying, " it was a big squarish frame house that had once been white" and went on to speak of how elaborate and gorgeous it was and got to the point of its current condition as being " left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps – an eyesore among

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In Williams Faulkner 's ‘A Rose for Emily’, a local narrator provides a very personally nuanced and chronologically disjoined narrative. Through this lens Faulkner uses the imagery and symbols of the Grierson home, Emily as a monument, Homer’s body, in “A Rose for Emily” to convey the theme of change vs. decay, especially as it relates to the American South and its traditions. Although he describes particular individuals within Jefferson (Miss Emily, the older men and ladies, the town leaders), he seems to be using them as symbols for the larger issues that the South was facing at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper discusses how Faulkner uses imagery and metaphor to highlight on the necessity of adaptation in changing times. This

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