Setting. Time.

       By avoiding the chronological order of events of Miss Emily's life, Faulkner first gives the reader a finished puzzle, and then allows the reader to examine this puzzle piece by piece, step by step. We learn about Emily’s life through a series of flashbacks. The story begins with a description of Emily’s funeral and then moves into the near-distant past. At the end of the story, we see that the funeral is a flashback as well, preceding the unsealing of the upstairs bedroom door. We see Emily as a young girl, attracting suitors whom her father chases off with a whip, and as an old woman, when she dies at seventy-four. By moving forward and backward in time,         Faulkner portrays the past and the present as coexisting and is able to examine how they influence each other. He creates a complex, layered, and multidimensional world.

        In the last chapter the author presents 2 visions on the time –“the diminishing road” and “the huge meadow that no winter ever quite touches”. As I understood the imagery, the first one is something constantly and continuously changing, it is forgetting the past leaving it behind and living in the present only. The second kind of time perception is living with the past just like it has never gone away (for “no winter ever quite touches” the memories and thoughts of the past), it is perpetual experiencing of the same emotions and feelings as a person had done in the past.  And that is the type which chose Emily and which author believes to be veracious. I may prove it by means of his quotations: “ The past is never dead. It’s not even past” or “There is no was”.

       As I already mentioned, I do not like the story very much and there are lots of things I would contradict and dispute with the author, though I respect his views and opinions. The second “model of time” seems to me destructive, dooming to privations and suffering and making things worth that they could have been. That is just what happened with Emily – she couldn’t let go of her past, couldn’t live in the moment and enjoy it, so that her life went so depredate and pitiful (to my opinion).