What is the most important element of fiction in "A Rose for Emily"?

Widely considered one of the greatest of American authors,
William Faulkner is superb in his employment of all elements of fiction.  In his "A Rose
for Emily" Faulkner's unique use of several narrators, the significantly Gothic tone
with the influence of the Southern milieu, the characterization of Emily, and the plot
itself are all skillfully rendered.

Most skillful is
the author's use of time (part of setting) in the plot of
his short story.  For, it is the shifts of time with the narrator's flashbacks that
prevent readers from "putting all the pieces together" and that help to create the
Gothic horror of the discovery at the end.  "A Rose for Emily" is divided into five
sections, with the first and last dealing with the present, the now
of the narrative, while the three middle sections detail the past. The story, thus,
begins and ends with the death of Miss Emily Grierson; the three middle sections cover
the time from soon after her father's death and shortly after her "beau," Homer Barron,
has deserted her, to the time of her death. 

In the fourth
section, Faulkner writes of Emily,

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Thus she passed from generation to
generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and
perverse.

These adjectives
describe each section of "A Rose for Emily." Critics argue that these descriptions
of the times of each section are a metaphorical characterization of the differing states
of mind that the townspeople pass through in their evaluation of Emily. For instance, in
his essay, "'A Rose for Emily':  Another View of Faulkner's Narrator," William V. Davis
correlates the two present sections with the adjectives that fall to them, giving Miss
Emily to the reader as the paradox she has become in death: "dear" and "perverse," while
before her death, she was inescapable, impervious, and tranquil."  Thus, during her
life, the woman who has been a mystery and an inscrutable and impenetrable is finally
clarified by the shifts of time.  Another look at the first death section reveals the
foreshadowing of Emily's final portrait:  Her house is an "eyesore among eyesores" in
"coquettish decay," there is a "tarnished gilded easel," and Miss Emily looks "bloated,
like a body submerged.

Skillfully arranged, the shifts in
time of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" serve to develop the Gothic horror and
explicate the narrative; as part of the plot they are key to the understanding
Faulkner's magnificent story.