Faulkner is demonstrating the human propensity to re-write the past. The old people wanted to pretend that they knew her well and cared for her, but this clearly was not the case. This theme is as much a storyline as is Emily's gruesome descent. In Part V, Faulkner writes:
They held the funeral on the second day, with the
town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very
old men-some in their brushed Confederate uniforms-on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.
The way Faulkner makes this one long nearly stream-of-consciousness passage is the way the older generation seeks to comfort themselves, and quickly. The men want to believe they had shown her social respect by including her in such activities as dancing, the women bring "store bought" flowers, a touch too little, too late; they didn't care enough to comfort her in life, and even in death their gestures are hollow, as are their feigned expressions of grief.
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