The Aspect of Time in William Faulkner´s Short Story A ROSE FOR EMILY

One of the three most important influences on Faulkner‘s writings were the family legends passed down to him. The legends and stories about his great-grandfather William Falkner had already fascinated him when he was a boy. Colonel Falkner appears in Faulkner’s fiction as Colonel John Sartoris (“Sartoris”, “Absalom, Absalom!”, “The Unvanquished” a.o.). Faulkner’s Negro nurse-mammy parallels at least partially Dilsey (“The Sound and the Fury”).

The results of Faulkner’s brief association with literary circles in New York and New Orleans were “Soldiers Pay”, “Mosquitoes” and some short stories.

The greatest influence though was the Mississippi world in which Faulkner lived most of his life. That region, with its history, its traditions and values, its people and communities and its countryside delivered a lot of material for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.5

Faulkner wrote well over one hundred short stories, many of them collected in above mentioned volumes. Some of his stories though Faulkner obviously decided not to collect, because he revised them for his novels. “Collected Stories” is considered the most important volume of Faulkner’s short stories since it reveals the full range of his fiction. All of the important Yoknapatawpha characters appear in it, linking the stories to his novels. However, there is also a sufficient number of stories set elsewhere. The volume contains material from all phases of his career, demonstrating characteristic themes and forms.6

Each of his stories posesses a coherent structure and significance for itself but is at the same time part of the whole, of “the continuum of Faulkner’s oeuvre”, which centers in his design of Yoknapatawpha County, its inhabitants and its history7.

Faulkner found short stories to be, after poetry, the most difficult of literary forms and more demanding than a novel. He put a lot of effort in his work in short fiction but still his stories never earned as much attention as his novels.8