The Coding of Time in Faulkner's A Rose for Emily In, A Rose for Emily, Faulkner uses the element of time to enhance the details of the setting and vice versa . Eschewing the chronological order of events in Miss Emily's life, Faulkner first gives the reader a finished puzzle, and then allows him to examine it piece by piece, step by step. In this way, it enhances the plot and presents two different perspectives of time maintained by the characters. The first perspective (the world of the present) sees time as a "mechanical progression" in which the past is a "decreasing road". The second perspective (the world of tradition and the past) sees the past as "a huge meadow that no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the last decade of years." The first perspective is that of Homer and the modern generation. The second is that of the older members of the Board of Aldermen and Confederate soldiers. Emily also holds the second view, except that for her there is no bottleneck separating her from the meadow of the past. Faulkner begins the story with Miss Emily's funeral, where the men see her as a "fallen monument" and the women are anxious. to see the inside of his house. It offers us the image of a woman who is fragile because she has "fallen", but important and symbolic as a "monument". The details of Miss Emily's house are closely linked to her and symbolize what she represents. It is set in "what had once been the choicest street". The narrator (who in this case is the city) describes the house as "stubborn and flirtatious". Cotton gins and garages have long since obliterated the neighborhood, but it's the only house left. With a further look at the l... half of Miss Emily's paper... the position regarding the specific problem of time is suggested in the scene where the old soldiers appear at her funeral. "The very old mes - some in their brushed Confederate uniforms - on the porch and lawn, talking about Miss Emily as she is, had been a contemporary of theirs, believing they had danced with her and perhaps courted, confusing time with her time. mathematical progression." These men have lost track of time as has Miss Emily. The hallucination; they imagine things that have never happened; there is no sense of time in their minds. Faulkner presents a truly terrifying image in this story, and he does so by playing with chronology, using symbols and foreshadowing, and presenting a detailed setting. Work cited Faulkner, William. “A rose for Emily.” Literature for composition. 4th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, et al. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.