The story is told out of chronological order, and this can make it difficult to put the pieces together as we read. In part 2, we learn that thirty years ago, Miss Emily Grierson "vanquished" town leaders, around the time that a terrible "smell" emanated from her property. The narrator also says that this was "two years after her father's death" and just a "short time after her sweetheart" had left her. At this time, even those few ladies who tried to visit Miss Emily were not allowed to enter her home.

We also learn, in part 2, that Emily's father felt that "none of the young men" who came to court her "were quite enough for Miss Emily." She had trouble parting with her father's body after he died, and people felt that "she would have to cling to that which had robbed her," in recognition of "all the young men her father had driven away." Essentially, Emily's father refused to allow her to marry anyone during his life, and then he left her all alone when he died.

In pat 3, we learn that Emily grew very sick after her father's death. When she recovered her health, she was often seen around town with Homer Barron, a Yankee laborer hired by the town to pave the sidewalks. People believed that "she was fallen," that she had slept with Homer. One day, she went to purchase arsenic, but she refused to tell the druggist what she intended to do with it.

In part 4, we learn that Homer went away, and people in town thought Emily would kill herself. The minister visited her about her relationship with Homer, and then his wife wrote to her relatives. Emily purchased some gifts that seemed to be wedding gifts for Homer: an engraved "man's toilet set in silver" and a full suit of men's clothes. Finally, her cousins appeared to have given up on her; they left town, and Homer returned. A neighbor saw Miss Emily's servant admit Homer to the house one night, and then no one ever saw him again after that. For a long time, no one saw Emily, and it was at this time that the men went to "sprinkle the lime" around her home to eliminate the bad smell. We also learn that her hair "attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray" color, a "vigorous iron-gray" that was pretty distinctive. After this point, Emily mostly remained a recluse. Time went on, and one day she died.

In part 5, the neighbors come to see the home after Emily's death, and Emily's servant simply leaves the house, never to return. Emily's family comes, and they bury her, but everyone "knew that there was one room" that "no one had seen in forty years." They waited until after Emily's funeral to force the door. The room was "decked and furnished as for a bridal," as though Emily had prepared the room for her wedding night with Homer, all those decades before. Everything is covered in dust, and the air smells "acrid," like a tomb. Homer's long-decayed body lies in the bed, "apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace." On the pillow next to his, they find a "long strand of iron-gray hair," the hair that was so unmistakably Miss Emily's. She has, evidently, been sleeping next to his mouldering corpse for years.

Thus, we can now begin to put together the pieces: Emily, seeing that Homer would either choose to leave her or that she would be compelled to part with him, poisoned him with the arsenic. It was the smell of his decaying body that had so pervaded her property that men had come at night to deal with it decades before. Rather than be abandoned by Homer, as she'd been abandoned by other suitors and her father, she killed Homer to keep him with her. She seems to have indulged in some fantasy that they were married rather than come to terms with her terrible and unbearable solitude.

At the end of the story, the aged Emily dies. After the funeral, the townspeople break down the locked door to her bedroom. They find the room decorated as a bridal chamber, with the dead, decomposed body of Homer Barron lying on the bed. On the pillow next to where he is lying, as if in an embrace, they find the imprint of a head and a gray hair. This suggests that even at the end of her life, Emily was crawling into bed and sleeping in Homer's embrace.

Emily spends her life in stasis, living frozen in the past like her father before her. She has never accepted reality, such as the need to pay property taxes. When she can't have Homer, who must have told her he was leaving, she poisons him with arsenic so that she can freeze time and have him with her forever.

This is Faulkner's way of condemning the South for trying to freeze time and live in the past, as if they never lost the Civil War and as if their old way of life had not changed. Living in this kind of stasis is like living with a corpse, Faulkner implies: it is not sweet or nostalgic but a grotesque form of collective mental illness.

At the end of the short story, the townspeople attend Miss Emily Grierson's funeral, and several curious citizens enter her home in order to clean out her possessions. The townspeople are curious to enter Emily's upstairs room, which nobody has been seen in over forty years. They break down the upstairs door to discover a room that is "furnished as for a bridal," and everything is covered with a thin layer of dust. They then discover Homer Barron's skeleton lying on the bed next to a pillow, along with a strand of iron-gray hair on it. The citizens' dramatic discovery suggests that Emily Grierson has been lying next to her dead lover's corpse each night, which is both shocking and macabre. The mystery of Homer Barron's disappearance is solved, and Emily Grierson's mental instability is portrayed by her implied necrophilia.

At the end of the story, the narrator is describing the state of Miss Emily's house after her death.  The townspeople, particularly townswomen, have gone in to clean out the house in the wake of Emily's passing.  This is the first time in years that anyone has been inside the house, with the exception of Miss Emily's servant. 

When the women go into Miss Emily's bedroom, they find the skeleton of a man that has been long dead.  They also find the toiletry kit of the man that has been etched with the initials "HB".  This confirms that the dead body is that of Homer Barron, Miss Emily's beau from long ago.  The townspeople had believed that Homer had left Miss Emily because he suddenly stopped being seen.  They had even believed that Emily was going to commit suicide, because she had purchased arsenic at the time of his disappearance.  However, this body tells us that Emily had used the arsenic on Homer, killing him and keeping his body in the house - which explains the smell from the house that the townspeople had been concerned about years before. 

Beside Homer on the bed is a strand of iron-gray hair - Miss Emily's hair.  She was so attached to Homer that not only did she kill him to prevent him from leaving, but she also lay in a bed with his dead body.

Creepy, huh?

What is the climax in "A Rose for Emily"?

I agree that the climax--the point of highest interest and suspense--is the moment the townspeople herd into Miss Emily's house after years of only her manservant having access.  They finally open the door to her most private place--her bedroom--only to discover that she had been sleeping with the Yankee they all condemned her for seeing in public.  A southern lady just didn't do these sorts of things, but then again, no one made the connection that he was up there as they were sneaking into her yard to spread lime in order to quell the stench of the "mouse" or other animal that had died somewhere on Miss Emily's property.  It just isn't good manners to tell a southern lady she smells...and she hid behind the rules of gentile southern behavior and escaped the crime of murder all the while protecting her good reputation rather than allowing Homer to have his way with her and then publically humiliate her.  Who said the south lost?  In Miss Emily's world, she (the South) was more than victorious.

What is the climax in "A Rose for Emily"?

After Emily is buried, some of the people of the town force open the room above the stairs in her house. They find the skeletal remains of Homer Barron, but the climactic part of this is when they find the long strand of gray hair on the pillow beside Homer. The narrator hints several times in the story that the town suspects Emily of killing Homer, but I don't think any of them dreamed that his body had been kept in Emily's house for over 40 years. The only hint of this is when she wouldn't allow her father's body to be removed for three days. But at that point, the reader tends to assume it's because her father was all she had.

What happens at the end of "A Rose for Emily"?

The timeline of "A Rose for Emily" is disrupted, beginning with her funeral and circling back to the main events of her life. The story ends, however, after Emily is "decently in the ground," with the townspeople forcing their way into a locked room in her house, where they find a dead man laid out on the bed. There is an indentation in the pillow beside him, and on the pillow, they find "a long strand of iron-gray hair."

Throughout the story, strange and unsettling images take precedence over explanation. The most obvious way to explain the images with which the story concludes is by assuming that when Homer Barron was about to leave Emily, she poisoned him. She then laid out his corpse in this room and continued to sleep beside him at night. This would all be in keeping with Emily's ruthless, high-handed, arbitrary approach to the world.

However, the fact that we are left with an image and not an explanation makes it easier to avoid passing judgment on Emily as a murderer or a lunatic. Readers sometimes ask where the rose of the story's title appears in the story. The color "rose" is mentioned in the final scene, but there is no actual flower. It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that Faulkner himself is presenting his protagonist with a rose by treating her conduct in the most chivalrous manner possible.

What is the ending of the story "A Rose for Emily"?

A few significant things happen at the end of section five.

Like the previous posting noted, Emily has died. In the narrative, we go back to the beginning when Emily's funeral was taking place and it is also the first moment we know that the ladies of the town have finally been let inside the house by Tobe.

This is an important fact, because Tobe escapes out the back door. This has always been a mystery which stems from Faulkner's original manuscript, in which Toby supposedly already knew what was going on in Emily's room and after Emily proposed to leave him her house he declined and said he will instead live in a poorhouse.  However, we do not know what was exactly what Tobe knew every since Faulker decided to take off that part of the story, and we as readers are led to believe that either he knew too much, or too little.

Another important thing was the smell of rot that led everyone to the house and the ultimate finding of Homer's carcass with a dent on the pillow next to him showing one of Emily's white hairs, showing that she had been sleeping with him all this time.

What is the ending of the story "A Rose for Emily"?

In the end of the story, Emily has died.  The narrator and some others have come into her house and they are going to go look in the upstairs room that no one had been in (no outsider at least) in forty years.  They have to break down the door to get in

What they find is that there is the decayed corpse of a man in the bed in the room.  He has been dead a long time.  The then notice that the pillow next to him has an indentation -- the shape of a head.  And it has a "long strand of iron-gray hair."

So the implication is that Miss Emily has been sleeping in the same bed as the corpse for all these years.

Give the climax from the story "A Rose for Emily." Support your answer with examples from the story.

"A Rose for Emily" is not told in chronological order, so the climax of the story isn't placed on the page where most readers would expect it to be.  The climax of the story is the final lines of the story.  

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

It's at this moment when most of my students all of a sudden say something like, "Wait. What? Oh that's so messed up!"  Faulkner chooses to end his story with its ultimate climax.  Readers figure out exactly what all of those other small details were leading up to.  Readers are told in section four that Emily buys enough arsenic to kill an elephant, but she refuses to say why she needs the poison.  We are told that shortly after buying the poison, Homer disappears and is never seen again.  In section two, readers are told that the awful smell developed shortly after Homer's disappearance.  In a different part of the story, we are told that Emily didn't willingly give up her father's dead body, so we know that she has a history of keeping a dead body in her house.  All of those pieces of information serve as foreshadowing and rising action.  They all lead up to the climactic moment when readers are told that Emily kept Homer's body in her bed for years and slept next to it.