Write an essay on "A Rose for Emily" answering these questions: The structure of a story can be something dull, but Faulkner used a very interesting structure for this story. Take a fresh look at the story, and analyze why he does not use events in a chronological order but mixes things up. Why does this make his story successful, or would it be even better in chronological and linear fashion? How does the narrator's opinion of Miss Emily change throughout "A Rose for Emily"? Does the narrator's admiration for her, even after she kills Homer Barron and sleeps with his corpse, bother you? What does the narrator's acceptance of Miss Emily's actions suggest about Southern culture?

Faulkner does present the events of the story out of chronological order.
He begins with Emily's funeral, the public response, and an explanation of why she was not responsible for paying taxes (the result of a fiction invented by Colonel Sartoris in 1894).
Next, the narrator explains how the next generation of mayors and aldermen called on Emily, now an old woman, to attempt to collect those taxes. She turns them away unsatisfied.
Then we go back in time some thirty years, about two years after her father died, when her house began to develop an awful smell. "After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all." It is at this point "when people had begun to feel really sorry for her." Insanity is in her genes, and she has been left all alone in the world.
Next, we go back in time to right after her father's death (two years before the smell developed) when, after an extended illness, Emily recovers and begins to see Homer Barron, a Yankee construction foreman. People pity her because her grief seems to have caused her to forget her station and class.
Later, Emily purchases rat poison. People think she is going to kill herself with the poison, and they "said it would be the best thing." The narrator also recalls having heard Homer say, loudly, that "he was not a marrying man," and people pity Emily all the more because she is going to be abandoned by this Yankee who is beneath her.
A short while after purchasing the rat poison, the minister compels Emily's Alabama cousins to come, and Emily begins making purchases of men's clothing and toiletries. The town is sure she and Homer will be married now, and they are glad because they like Emily's cousins less than they like her.
Homer leaves (his job in town finished), the cousins are overthrown (with the whole town on Emily's side), Homer returns, and he is then seen entering Emily's house for the last time.
Emily's door remains shut for many years, with few exceptions, until she finally closes up shop for good and admits no one else. Then she dies at age 74.
After her death, Homer's decaying body is discovered in her bed with an indentation in the pillow next to his. There, they find a strand of Emily's hair.
The events in chronological order would be presented by using the numbers above as follows: 4, 3, 5, 6, 7, 2, 8, 1, 9. By presenting events out of chronological order, Faulkner prevents us from immediately jumping to the conclusion that Emily is purchasing the rat poison to kill Homer Barron and that the horrible smell emanating from her home is, indeed, his rotting corpse. He creates a great deal more mystery and interest by leaving clues that we must work to connect—as opposed to having them connected for us by their chronology. In addition, there has always been an air of mystery, of otherness, about Miss Emily—perhaps because people in the town get most of their news about her secondhand or even thirdhand. Presenting the events of her life in a jumbled order helps to retain this mystery. Further, the people in town pity her and judge her at different points in time, rooting against her at one point and for her at another. By presenting the events of her life out of order, attention is drawn to the community's hypocrisy regarding this human woman. A chronological presentation of her life could not have accomplished all of these results.
In terms of the narrator's opinion of her, it seems to have changed—as I have described above—with the rest of the community. They pity her when her father dies, they pity her when she begins to see Homer and they pity her when they believe he will not marry her. They even think it would be better for her to kill herself with rat poison than go on living, and, then—in a total reversal—they actually root for her against her cousins, who "were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been." Now, the entirety of the story is written from a first-person objective point of view that uses the past tense; therefore, the narrator knows, even from the start, how Emily's story ends (this is why he can begin the story with her death). He does still seem to present her sympathetically, and his strategy seems to intend to elicit the same emotion from readers. But why? Is she not a murderer? Well, yes. But she was, in some ways, a victim first. She was a victim of the traditions and mores of the Old South. Expected to listen and obey, her father seems to have denied her a say in making choices that would impact the rest of her life. He then died, leaving her utterly alone in the world. At one point, the narrator says,

We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

She was robbed of companionship by a powerful man who then abandoned her. Rather than permit such a thing to happen again, she assumed power over another powerful man, preventing him from ever abandoning her. It is not healthy, it is not legal, and it is not a good thing, but it is, in some ways, understandable and pitiable. Thus, the narrator's telling of these events and evident sympathy for Emily seems to condemn the traditions of the Old South.