This Is Heavy, Doc

Well, William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a bit odd, no? While this story was certainly the most dramatically interesting, it also was most definitely the most bizarre. Faulkner establishes this quirkiness by writing with an extremely convoluted chronology. The story opens with the present time of Emily Grierson's death and funeral. The narrator then recounts an altercation between Miss Emily and the Board of Alderman over taxes which occurred several years beforehand. Immediately afterward, the narrator employs flashback even further by taking the plot thirty years earlier. This scene, which describes how the city dealt with a "smell" about Miss Emily's house, creates a bit of confusion and suspense as the reader is unsure and curious of the source of the smell. Upon completion of this tale, however, the narrator goes back two years further to Miss Emily's father's death and the subsequent arrival of Homer. We then learn of Miss Emily's purchase of arsenic, followed by a seemingly abrupt topic shift to Homer's departure and ensuing return to the house.

After that, the narrator fast-forwards back to the present. It is here, in the present, that the jumbled events of the past are finally explained as the narrator and the other men discover Homer's skeleton where he had poisoned with the purchased arsenic. Instead of simply starting from the chronological beginning, Faulkner employed a series of flashbacks in order to increase the level of suspense of the story. By slowly feeding the reader individual clues, Faulkner leads the reader to finally discover the truth of Miss Emily's past in a more dramatic and exciting fashion.