Disarranged Events In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

In William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily,” A woman named Emily Grierson dies after numerous years of living a secluded lonely life. The story is narrated by the town’s people recounting the events of her life leading up to her death. Only to discover a shocking secret after attending her funeral. The secret Emily had been keeping was fairly gruesome. She had poisoned and kept the decaying body of a man named Homer Barron rumored to have once been her sweetheart. William Faulkner uses a disarrangement of events, foreshadowing, and obscured occurrences which creates a sense of mystery that builds the suspense giving the reader an event to anticipate. In “A Rose for Emily” the writer William Faulkner’s first example of disarranged events is by starting off this story with the death of Emily Grierson. He

“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.”(144). He then discloses that Emily has a sweetheart after the death of her father, but he has yet to be introduced to the reader, which creates more suspense for creating curiosity as to who this man is and could he be the reason for Emily’s seclusion. “That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart—the one we believed would marry her—had deserted her.” (145). Throughout this story Faulkner jumps from previous events to the present time closer to Emily Griersons death without full detail which is saved for the end to keep the reader