Faulkner's A Rose for Emily deals is an intriguing story which uses a jerky, roller-coaster style of time flow. The story jumps around in time so that you are constantly only receiving bits and pieces of the details and have to form your ideas and organize them as the story goes on. Emily's family's prominent stature in the community is a highly regarded one. Unfortunately as time progresses, Emily's stature weakens, but she continues to live in the past, in her own reality and doesn't recognize what is happening around her. People in the community notice how Emily is living in the past and rationalize the situation, which leads to the community sympathizing with Emily. This rationalizing and sympathizing is what ultimately leads to the ability for Emily to commit a serious crime and get away with it without even being questioned.
             "Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron--remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity." (622) The previous exert from the story gives us an idea of the status of Miss Emily's family name. As I stated before, as time goes on, Miss Emily's status in the community declines. Her father, who was the one with fame, has passed away and she lives alone. There are no more prominent people there with her to give her name the prestige it once had but Emily does not see that. She lives in the past where she is very important and she holds her head up high and stays in that frame of mind.
             Being an established community, people remember Miss Emily's family and understand why she acts like she does. Emily is enabled to live in the past with no worries because of the way people rationalize her s...