SOURCE: “Of Time and Its Mathematical Progression: Problems of Chronology in Faulkner's ‘A Rose for Emily,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 29, 1992, pp. 195–204.

In the following essay, Moore proposes a chronology of events in “A Rose for Emily.”

Over the past 30 years, no fewer than eight different chronologies have been proposed to account for the events occurring in William Faulkner's celebrated short story “A Rose for Emily.”¹ These chronologies cover a span of 14 years (Miss Emily was born between 1850 and 1864, and died between 1924 and 1938), and they make use of many different kinds of evidence: not only internal temporal references and cross-references in the story, but also historical, biographical, canonical, and even forensic evidence. Given the amount of interest generated by this question and the range of evidence employed in the various arguments, it is remarkable that no one seems ever to have regarded the original manuscript as a...