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
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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