In "A Rose for Emily," Faulkner uses the elements of time and setting to foreshadow Emily Grierson's decay of life, physically and mentally. 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. By doing so, he enhances the plot and presents two different perspectives of time held by the characters. The first perspective (the world of the present) views time as a "mechanical progression" in which the past is a "diminishing road." The second perspective (the world of tradition and the past) views the past as "a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years"
             Faulkner begins the story with Miss Emily's funeral, where the men see her as a "fallen monument"(I.1548) and the women are anxious to see the inside of her house. He gives us a picture of a woman who is frail because she has "fallen," yet as important and symbolic as a "monument." The details of Miss Emily's house closely relate to her and symbolize what she stands for. It is set on "what had once been the most select street"(I.1548). The narrator (which is the town in this case) describes the house as
             "stubborn and coquettish"(I. 1548). Cotton gins and garages have long obliterated the neighborhood, but it is the only house left (I.1548). With a further look at Miss Emily's life, we realize the importance of the setting in which the story takes place. The house in which she lives remains static and unchanged as the town progresses. Inside the walls of her abode, Miss Emily conquers time and progression.
             In chapter one, Faulkner takes us back to the time when Miss Emily refused to pay her taxes. She believes that just because Colonel Sartoris remitted her taxes in 1894...