The Aspect of Time in "A Rose for Emily"

“Leave the past in the past,” my mother often told me. Whether I had just broken a vase, spilt some juice, or gotten a bad grade on a test, my mom never wanted me to dwell on my blunders. When it came to the mistakes I had made, her main objective was to help me learn from them and move on. Moving on can be very hard. Past experiences drastically affect us, and it can be very easy to let them shape us. Sometimes time can mask the past and heal our wounds, but many times it creates us. Time is an interesting aspect of life, and William Faulkner played with this element in his short story, A Rose For Emily. By experimenting with time in his story, Faulkner was able to teach his readers to not let the past control the future.

Most of the story, A Rose for Emily is told in bouts of flashbacks. Faulkner did this in order to provide his readers with a deeper understanding for time. After all, time is just an element of sequenced events. It can be warped and subjected to the events it is measured by. Faulkner wanted his readers to realize this. Emily’s short story starts with a flash back to Emily’s funeral, yet the story covers many events of Emily’s life. Many authors use flashbacks to reveal important truths about characters that the reader might need to know before the story goes on, but Faulkner’s reason for using them goes much deeper than that. He is trying to make a point about how seriously time effects Emily. Her past completely determines her future. She can not escape it. In order to show his readers what the past can do, he wrote this story with a plethora of flashbacks. Not only did these flashbacks teach us about Emily, but they showed us why she was the way she was and why she did the things she did.

Faulkner’s two aspects of time were concrete and malleable. His concrete aspect of time seems to be unalterable. It is where time moves forward constantly, and what’s done is done. It is the aspect of time where only the present occurs. This sense of time is observed during Emily’s funeral and the unveiling of her bedroom. It is seen when Emily is talking to other people. The way she is depicted does not show why she is the way she is. It does not show how she may have felt or what she may have been thinking. This concrete aspect of time depicts only the present as the truth and reasoning behind everything. The second kind of time manipulation that Faulkner uses is very subjective. This is the type of time where things that happened or are happening can be understood. Actions make more sense and actions are ever-changing. This type of time can be observed in the story when the narrator describes what the townspeople are thinking and feeling about Emily. The stories of Emily’s father and the depiction of Homer Barron show how time can manipulate people. These experiences and encounters in Emily’s life manipulated her, and then left her in the past. By using both of these aspects of time, William Faulkner was able to show how memories can stay in the past, but they can also follow their victims to the future. This was the case with, “Poor Emily.”

Time is just another way to track experiences. It is not the time that matters so much as where occurrences are left in it. In the story, A Rose for Emily, Emily was unable to change as her world around her did. Her experiences left her with values that were no longer acceptable and people that were no longer understanding. By adding specific elements of time into his story about Emily, Faulkner was able to show the importance of evolving with time and leaving the past in the past.

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