Imagery in Faulkner's A rose for Emily

Introduction

The reading of "A Rose for Emily" is usually a first step into the world of William Faulkner for freshman literature we. Intrigued as they are initially by the story's ending, these unsophisticated readers often remain perplexed by this complex, challenging Faulknerian world where the town of Jefferson is much more than simply the setting: this town is a character with a voice and values. And this town, understood as setting, character, and narrative voice, controls "A Rose for Emily" from opening through closing sentence. We sort through Faulkner's interlaced patterns to the discovery that we ultimately know more about the town and its attitudes than we know about Emily Grierson herself.

Analysis

To assist "first foray into Yoknapatawpha" (Brooks 107), we can establish the narrative voice by discussing the first paragraphs. We can demonstrate that this narrator, the voice of the town, an unnamed townsperson, present at the funeral of Emily Grierson, knows her life story, one constructed from the gossip, speculations, and legends of the town. We can posit that the narrator constructs this story-telling as a stream of associations, a mesh of dramatic scenes and images. Although this telling is not ordered chronologically, a chronology of events can be detected. Here by the use of Table One (see below) we can begin to delineate with our students, in parallel lines, the actual story line of events and the actual chronology of events. As we move scene by scene on the story line, we can connect the event there to its appropriate place on the chronology line (Gaston Bachelard, pp 126-13).

This delineation focuses on the importance of time for Faulkner. These parallel lines help us fathom that for Faulkner, clock time, man's measure of the chronology of events, is not the essential time. Rather, time is experience, captured and held within the consciousness, is essential. Thus to Faulkner the past is ever present: was is is.

Approaching our teaching of "A Rose for Emily" by discussing the crucial dramatic scenes as they are presented on the story line, the student sees the town as character and voice; the suspension of our accustomed time order; the juxtaposition of past and present time in a narrative strategy; the crucial images; and Emily Grierson as the town knows her and as Faulkner wants the reader to understand her (Chris Weedon, pp 11-77).

The narrative begins at its near-end, at the funeral of Emily Grierson. The voice of "our town" identifies Emily as a "tradition, a duty, and a care." Men and women of "our town" react differently to her. The men act from "respectful affection for a fallen monument;" the women, from "curiosity." This sense of "hereditary obligation" triggers a memory. In 1894 Colonel Sartoris had remitted her taxes, but generations change within the story, and their values differ. So the next generation, feeling no "hereditary obligation," attempts to collect these reportedly remitted taxes (Birk, pp. 203-13).

This encounter between the "next generation with its modern ideas" and the ...