Time Out of Joint: Revisiting the Chronology Quandary of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

Abstract

Time, particularly its effect on the residence of the postbellum South, is a central theme in Faulkner, and in the whole of the Yoknapatawpha canon arguably no other work better foregrounds the issue of time than his celebrated short story “A Rose for Emily.” Not unlike an author of an engaging mystery novel, Faulkner invites his readers to rummage through the myriad of textual clues to ascertaining the fabula sequence from the given syuzhet. Reconstructing the proper chronology of the story is made even more challenging when one takes the next logical step to determine the year of occurrence of some of the key events in the story. Through the years, scores of scholarly papers, in multiple languages and academic disciplines, have sought to settle the so-called “chronology quandary” once and for all. This study attempts to add to this ongoing scholarly debate, relying on close reading of the text and taking into account fascinating new discursive tools, such as ‘game theory.’