The effect of the final paragraph is to create shock and horror. Throughout the entire piece, Faulkner does give clues that Miss Emily could have inherited some of her family's insanity, but because the narrator's view is peripheral, the reader doesn't know anything more about what goes on inside the Grierson home than the town does. It is only in the final paragraph where all the puzzle pieces come together to answer the questions created throughout the story. Why did Miss Emily buy poison? Why did she purchase men's items in the store? What had happened to Homer Barron? What had happened to Miss Emily? The answers to these questions are shocking and disturbing. The reader is left staring at the gray hair and indentation on the bed along with the town, and Faulkner never directly says what happened, but the implications are clear.
The final paragraph reveals both the...
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town's callousness towards Emily's loneliness as well as the gruesome reality of the life she had been living. The shock of realizing that Emily had been sleeping with a corpse (as evidenced by the indention of her head on the pillow beside the decomposed body and the gray hair atop the pillowcase) makes their guilt very palpable. Throughout the story, Faulkner has carefully implicated the townspeople by phrases such as "we" and "our" in order to convey the feeling that thistragedy is the result of a systematic group failure.