The Furnished Room

Read our detailed study guide on the short story The Furnished Room by O. Henry. Our study guide covers The Furnished Room summary, themes, characters, and literary analysis.

The Furnished Room Summary

The narrator begins by illustrating a humdrum scene of New York City. He says the City is restless, that it is an island populated by dysphoric people. These people were missing a green thumb, for crafts like gardening take time, patience and gentle love. He said the people were too fleeting, their emotions too windy. They would pack up their whole lives in a satchel and wandered around, with no strings attached to their last shelter.

He also remarked on the fact that these houses had thick air, full of souls and spirits. It would be strange, too strange, if one had never felt the heavy atmosphere, choking with indications of past lives.

A young disheveled lad, who had a layer of dust settled on him, went from door to door in one of these red housed neighborhoods. He halted at the twelfth door and pressed the bell. A bulk of flesh came to the door. She appeared to be the landlady. She ushered him inside after he had asked for a spare room.

She showed him a room on the third floor and advertised it to the brim. He paid for the room for a week and asked her the question he had really wanted to ask. The question was about a girl he was looking for by the name of Eloise Vashner. He described her, mentioning that she had a dark spot growing near her left eye. 

He asked Mrs. Purdy, the landlady if she had ever let a room to her. Mrs. Purdy said she had never done so. He had asked all theater folks and visited all theaters. But his efforts and questions were futile.

 After Mrs. Purdy left, he settled in one of the chairs. In the luminance of the gaslight, his gaze flitted over everything inside the room. Each item relayed its story. He saw how the room was misused, and the ones who bruised it did it out of spite. In between this reverie, he caught a strong scent of a white flower, and he answered it. He recognized the scent that it belonged to his darling Eloise. Convinced she had been in the room he ransacked the room to come upon a belonging of her.

The young fellow trudged back up to his room. He sat down in the glow of the gaslight for a moment. The next moment he ripped the bedsheets into pieces and stuffed the pieces in all the cracks. Offed the gaslight and then turned the gas back on. He made a walk to the bed and lay in it, surrendered.

Later the same evening, Mrs. Purdy informed Mrs. McCool (her co-worker) that she had left the room to a young man. She also told her she had not revealed to the man the events of last week that took place in the room. Mrs. McCool flattered Mrs. Purdy’s keen eye of business and recollected the day they both cleaned the mess a suicide had caused in the room, suicide by gas.

Mrs. Purdy commented on the beauty and charm of the suicide victim, except that she had a dark spot growing beside her left eye.

Background of the Story

“The Furnished Room”, a grim short narration by O’ Henry was published in fragments in 1904. Later in 1906, it was collected as one whole piece in his The Four Million copy.

Literary Context

The twentieth-century American literature had its strings coiled around the aftermath of pre and post World War 1. Although existentialism provoked America around 1946, it was quite a bit of debate from a century ago. The chaos of the War not only targeted the general body of most countries, it wrecked the people, the relations and the entire social dependency.

A stale feeling of nothingness and pointlessness settled like dust upon anything and everything that used to hold meaning. O’ Henry catches a distinct frame of this. The transitory nature of the city and the interests of people changing with a blink of an eye, all quench down to this existential bearing. The War suspended real emotions, real talents and true identities. The War suspended entire units of person, distilling all common sense and normal human behaviour.

People felt a severe absence of meaning and happiness, and wanting it as much as they did, they could not get it. So in pursuit of happiness, the people developed ephemeral natures.

Realism was another cradle of the pre World War. There was no space, innocence, delicacy, joy and content left in idealism. The War had dug out the gravest of realities and people saw no point in shying away from the crude and harsh. The intensity and depth of the situation kept falling into realization like dead bodies and free debris from the sky.

In that sense, O’ Henry was the bleakest and meanest narrator of this story. He unveiled the true anxiety behind the young man’s tortures, the tortures of looking for the beloved. Just as the people of the world had looked for their loved ones in the rubble of strewn bodies. And people who were in search of their beloved countries, not as they were after and before the war, but as they were when peace prevailed.

Although drama was not a considerable or dominant form of art at the time, it attracted Americans travelling all around Europe because it was new and open to experimenting. Coming back to their own land, they set up the Little Theatre movement. Because it was still new, playwrights, dramatists and actors could write and present an array of matters in an even abundant and diverse way, without many restrictions. This has culminated in the short story pretty well. There was a whole society set apart for theaters and theater-goers. The young man’s wife had been arrested by the same new craze.

It was this art form that hatched the idea of using the depiction of stream of consciousness. As did O’ Henry, as his entire story propagates through the stream of the young man’s consciousness. This sort of new dramatization also acted out psychological analysis. It awed people to be able to see the inside, the human thought, acted out so well on the outside. The young man’s psychological bearings are no secret from the reader throughout the story.

Characters Analysis

The Young Man

It is common knowledge by now that the protagonist was young and what is common of fresh younglings, they tend to fall in love and they fall hard. The narrative soon revealed he was, in fact, seeking for his girl. His face was primed with a layer of dust and he had been carrying around baggage. This baggage could mean his luggage and or his pain, torment and heartache. This long inquiry process tested him for five long months.

 His devotion, concern and bother had exceeded all sensible bounds and contrived into an imposing fixation. He combed through New York for her and checked even in places he was cringing to find her. But this also translates that he had a good degree of patience saved in him. 

Waiting and interrogating for this stretch of time can be pretty testing, that’s more than most of us could’ve done. He was the kind of a fellow that was content with most in life. The kind who would take whatever opportunities may come his way and not rebel with his luck or kismet.

 Material things like money, name, and success did not matter much to him if he could get by. He did not care to work himself to the ground and prove his worth to the on-lookers. He was someone who would be gratified settled on a countryside ranch, with a small family and maybe a dog. He denounced the hustle-bustle of city life. He entertained an innocent desire for a consistent life.

He possessed polite and mannerly handling. He had a quiet and temperate dialogue and would not indulge in fruitless banter with Mrs. Purdy. He conversed with Mrs. Purdy with an adequate tone and attitude, even when he so badly did not want to believe the hopeless report she gave him about Eloise.

Deciding to abandon all sense and hope and to press lights-out is not a click-snap choice. One does not just take a stroll in the park and come upon this accord. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and when he was called, he did not cower or budge. He was decisive and fearless when he wanted to be, who he wanted to be for.

He never liked Mrs. Purdy much, even though he had never crossed paths with her before. Her voice was not exactly his most favorite thing in their first encounter, meaning evidently he was a good judge of character and vibes. But when she fed him lies, there may have been a good portion of doubt in him, but he did not call her out on it. Meaning he could assess offensive personalities pretty well but would choose to stay mute about them.

Not only did he observe characters but also his surroundings, even hushed ones. He established the aura of the room and all the pieces in it, tagged a story with each. Recognized the scent he should’ve long forgotten, in a few seconds. Some may say his sixth sense was his active reflex.

Mrs. Purdy

Right off the bat, Mrs. Purdy is shown to be a gross beefy blob of flesh. She either looked ravenous or she was again, just too disgustingly fat. The young man may as well have seen her as a huge slimy slobbering monster, with the way he described her. Her voice had some measure of femininity but not in an attractive melodious manner.

She advertised the room to the young man with a perfect balance between desperation and indifference, only what a skilled and business-oriented professional could do.The young man’s casual peripheral notice commented that the room had been carelessly cleaned.

 Other than that, the house groaned with each step, the atmosphere stunk of stale air and radiance may have been an ancient concept to the house. She did not care to replenish it. So even though Mrs. Purdy had a keen eye for collecting money, she could care less about how she did it. This clearly demonstrated her greedy and selfish custom.

Sitting with Mrs. McCool and enjoying a drink seemed to be a recurring pattern for her. She also created the impression that indulging in good gossip was one of her favorite pastimes.

Along with being hopelessly and helplessly fat, she was also a fat punctual liar, because once a liar, always a liar. This quirk of hers was pretty clear by the end of the story.

Eloise Vashner

She was the love interest of the protagonist in the story. She was a beautiful girl, petite in height and waist, with red-gold ringlets for hair. A small mole growing near her left eye was the only flaw to her face. She had a melodious singing voice and for some time sung in theatres. 

She had left her home to be a singer and to chase her dream, to see to it that she made a name in the industry. But she had to run away from her beloved in order to pursue her ambition. 

This directly pointed to her having a rebellious nature and fighting for what she believed in. On a contrary analysis, she also was a very sensitive soul with a huge mix of dramatism. She had to possess some extent of a dramatic demeanor, for she wanted to work in the theatre. She had also taken the rash and irrational decision of leaving home. Even though it was for something she believed in, she could’ve found another way around this approach.

It is a known fact that success does not come overnight. Theatrical workers are well aware that five months may hardly build them a base, but Eloise wished for it too soon. Or it could have been the guilt of leaving the man who loved her so dearly behind, or maybe both, that drove her to end her life.

She was also most of the time misunderstood. The young man may not have understood her desire to become a singer, and neither did her audience see much talent in her. In this regard, she also sounded like she was a very brave woman. 

She kept on going for quite some time without much support from her loved ones. Two roads were diverged in a yellow path for her, and she took the one less travelled, just as Robert Frost did.

Mrs. McCool

Mrs. McCool was a co-worker of Mrs. Purdy. She must have been an oldie, around Mrs. Purdy’s age. She was old but she could butter up a person better than a chef could butter bread. She would do and say all things to please her coworker, Mrs. Purdy, so she could remain in her good graces. 

She praised Mrs. Purdy for convincing the young man to take the room and not telling the truth about Eloise Vashner. It also shows that she was weak, she did not have her own opinions and could not stand for what was right.

 It was clear that Mrs. Purdy had the business wrapped up under her supremacy and she wore the pants in hers and Mrs. McCool’s relation. Consequently, Mrs. McCool let her decide major things and let her talk their clients up; meaning Mrs. McCool was a major pushover. 

She also seemed to enjoy their little meetings in the basement, or maybe that was also a pretense to delight Mrs. Purdy. Mrs. McCool may remind one of Beadle Bamford from the movie Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street but in a mellow helpless kind of way.

Themes in The Furnished Room

Ephemeral Nature

Human nature is a grinding machine. Moving is living is what we say. And it is true. But moving so much that you cannot stop and smell the roses, now that is a mighty gloom. That is what O’ Henry’s (now corpse-like) protagonist was sullen about, as he went door to door, disapproving of the New Yorkers. 

They pay rent for barely taking half solid dung in the toilet. They pay plenty of rent at a time, only to step into their space, take a few tiresome breaths inside, and then step back out for days. Not only are the poor, overworked New Yorkers arrested for this sin, but the entire personage. The past world existed as an intricate web of dependency, now only broken chains of individuals.

Individualism in that sense was also one of the themes between the lines. We Homo sapiens are hopelessly transitory, we cannot make families, and neither can we keep friends. O’ Henry’s poor guy also was facing some bit of the same complication. At one point in the narration, O’ Henry claimed such people know nothing about gardens. Gardens are spaces to be lived in; spaces to spend time in so one can nurture it with love.

The young man was looking for a room to stay in, but his real purpose was to find his dearest, who had left her home. 

In this huge city,  he was sure she would be somewhere, but trouble in paradise arose when he realized this city was restless, always shuffling its stacks.

Love and Determination

Love and obsession like the young man could find a needle in the hay. And he does find her, but only in essence. His passion for Eloise had exceeded physical bounds, for he found her to be a feeling, a presence he could not see, only feel. His yearning for her made him converse with the scent. 

His love had learned the language of silence, and he was well aware it was absolutely batty.

Isolation and Loneliness

Although Mrs. Purdy acted selfishly and concealed the vital info from the young man about the room and the charming girl with the spot near her left eye, this conduct was a compulsion on the grounds of the survival of the fittest. This sort of greedy demeanor cradled desolation. The young man was worried about exactly this attitude when he came into the city. 

Another abstract that this approach affirmed was the strange experience of the young man when he sloped in the chair, and a plethora of voices and scents spiraled around him in throngs, forming a loud gyre around him. And he felt no connection and had never felt so lonely; as if he was deaf and the world heard everything.

 He was in the quiet eye of the storm. It was as if the silence never spoke more loudly to him. And the louder the silence spoke, the more it echoed within the walls of the room, the more the room felt empty to him. Every time a voice resonated towards him, Eloise’s absence was dreadfully felt.

 This hush suffocated him and the mute got to him so severely that he gave up and welcomed the calm lull of death. He chose eternal ignorance over a perpetual gauge of perplexities and drab agony.

Hopelessness

Even before he decided to surrender his senses to dejection, the wretchedness of the situation had made a home in him. He was mighty hesitant even before he asked the forever dreadful question. The past five months eroded his constancy and dedication. Only a small core of him was left behind, that did not cower in the corner when he stuffed all possibilities of dodging death and lay in bed to gawk death down.

Literary Analysis

This story revolves around the transitory, selfish and lying nature of New Yorkers. The story is about a young man searching for a girl who may be his girlfriend or wife. She left her home to chase a career as a singer in the theater. His search brings him to New York, specifically to the West Side. 

For five long months, he scours through the apartment buildings of the West Side New York, especially the areas that are populated by theatergoers. Door to door, room to room and owner to owner, he only asked one question, if any one of these folks had seen or let a room to Eloise Vashner. He described her to them, but always heard responses in negatives. 

He finds a building and pays for a room to stay. He asked the owner of that building, Mrs. Purdy, about Eloise Vashner. She lied to him about never chancing upon Eloise Vashner. Later he caught Eloise’s scent in the room. He went about scrounging through the items left behind by past inhabitants, in mighty anticipation of scoping out a belonging of Eloise. But to no avail. 

He again asked Mrs. Purdy about her and she lied to him again, without guilt or remorse. Furious and tired, he walked back up to the room and committed suicide, the very same way Eloise had, choking and poisoned with gas.

Language

His general language was simple and flowy. There was an unwrinkled flow to his dictions.

A very uniform fluidity when his narration tipped from one character to the other. The shift and transition from one dialogue to the next was effortless. However, it does not mean the narration was flat. There is an edge to his pieces. A constant tension in his words that keep his audience guessing when the scale may tip over. His words in the story promise a foreshadow of mighty commotion.

The content was always mattered up with a rich selection of words, but he eliminated the employment of chunky verbosity. This means that more than decorating his stories with superfluous words, he wished for a clear propagation. Mingled with that, his grammar and sentence structure were mellow but immaculate, twining pretty well with the register.

There was also an array of figurative language dispersed through-out the story. The anecdote included antidotes of simile, metaphors and personification. Personification was scoped in abundance in ratio to simile and metaphor.

Tone

The tone and attitude of this story were serious and even dull. It was severe in its subject matter, but in the matter of narration, it was gentle but also vacant and cold. The elemental expression was dismal and melancholic. Therefore, the discourse and the registry of the voice were abiding by a sober and earnest recount.

Setting

The story was set in the obscure and scruffy New York West Side. It was depicted to be a residential area for the theater community. The location was spotted with apartment buildings and old red condos to be let. The tragedy took place in a room belonging to one of these aged houses.

Point of View

It was a third-person point of view, an outside sneak peek from a window into the protagonist’s life. The dictation was of an omniscient stature.

Philosophy

It is obvious the employment of personification was engaged in abundance, but O’ Henry went the extra mile and introduced anthropomorphism. It is the ascribing of human actions and habits to non-human existences. 

The scent, the items in the room, the room itself and the ancient house, are far from being non-human entities, but O’ Henry goes on ahead and puppeteers the young man to treat all these non-living materials as non-human essences. He grants a feminine voice to smell. Shapes it as an embodiment and evaluates the house to be a diseased gray man to grow the story active and adequate.

This practice in literature also cradles minimalism. In “The Furnished Room”, minimalism was expressed in a way that cut down the number of characters. Therefore the dialogues were scanty but competent, and the authorial speech, narrator speech and dialogue speech did not jam the fluency of the theme or voice. The story remained effortless, simple and short.

Significance of the Title

A sneak peek into the story revealed that O’ Henry was intrigued and fascinated by motel rooms and apartments that were stayed in by people with theatrical careers. Earlier in the story, the narrator pondered on these houses to be alive with the stories of the dead or those that are gone.

Whatever tragedies, fury, sexual energy, happiness and gloom had been left behind as legacies, would be wiped away by landladies under the greedy, feeble and futile term of furnish. The title “The Furnished Room” is a laughable mock by O’ Henry. He wanted to expose the selfish nature of business-oriented shallow owners, who dusted the delicate sufferings that tenants had gone through, under the rug, without a grain of penance or decency.

Symbolism

The room crumbled at the seams and its maltreatment was the emblem, and some may say one of the motifs of the room. The young man observed the room and noticed that it had been hurt and trashed, with passionate anger, anger that had deep-set roots. 

He said the relationship between their lash-out and this abused room was the irony the room catered. These rooms should disguise as a home for those away from home, but the mockery and coarse paradox was that it only culminated the fact that these wanderers would always be drifters without hometowns, homes and families.

It also shed light on the fact that artists and men chasing their dreams and inspirations were only served with such scanty unkempt residencies.

The walls listened and the air recorded, is another recurring symbol. As the proverb says, “walls have ears.” It is true that if a place witnesses too much history, it starts to ingrain it on its own parchment and with its own quill.·   

Conflict

All the consequences in the story, such as Eloise leaving the young man, Mrs. Purdy not coming clean to him about the room, and then lying to him, were all because of confusion and lies. There was disarray, a pandemonium between the relations.

PERSON VS PERSON CONFLICT

This was pretty clear, pertaining to the distortion between the young man and his girl. It also meddled in, in regards to Mrs. Purdy’s dishonesty.

PERSON VS SELF CONFLICT

Even though O’ Henry did not shed much light on this, there was a sort of guilt and grief smeared across the young man’s expressions. Regardless of the reason Eloise left him for, it is clear there was an established sharing of feelings between them. 

She may have left him because he did not understand her passion for singing. Or maybe singing was her excuse to escape because he was an inattentive and lousy partner. It could also be that Eloise was a very dramatic chick and ran away because of one petty argument. Whatever the reason, the young man set out to look for her and have her make up with him. That alone spoke of his fault.

Towards the end, when he lay down in his bed to die, a part of him did so as a punishment. Which is why he was satisfied when he did so. He blamed himself for driving her out of his hold and a part of him always knew he may never find her again.

PERSON VS GOD Conflict

There is not much alignment with god or religion in the story, but every man must believe in something, especially in the hour of need. Just as the lyrical poetry in Carnival of Rust says, “Do you breathe the name of your savior in your hour of need?”

Whatever god was for the young man, he was aggravated at him too. It may have felt like god was playing a royal joke on him. Every time he got just a bit closer to her (like her scent), he would find himself leagues and light years away, back to square one all over again. He felt stumped and powerless. The only thing he had power over was his death.

The irony was that Eloise had done exactly the same, so in a strange way; he had found her and had never been more close to her. God works in mysterious ways. Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist comments on such a situation, “Every search begins with the beginner’s luck and every search ends with the victors being severely tested.” So he was victorious when he caught a dash of her scent, but his test was that if he wanted to get to her, he had to lose himself. Poetic justice decided by god, the only way both could have been together.

Plot development

Like every other short story, this one too is structured with the same old elements; the exposition, rising action (conflict), falling action (climax), and the resolution or ending.  

• The exposition of the story was when the narrator scorns the New Yorker’s modern nomadic nature and then hatches a fellow. This fellow goes  to buildings, to hunt for a spare room. He finds a room to be let in the twelfth building and asks the owner if she had Eloise Vashner living in one of these rooms in the past few months. The owner affirms in the negative.                    
• The rising action premiers when he reclines in the chair listening to a thousand stories told to him by the scents and assets of the past tenants, in the warm glow of the gaslight. He catches a whiff of a familiar perfume. He searches the room in hopes of chancing upon one of his darling’s possessions. He picks up on the fleeting scent again. He skips downstairs and asks the owner about the history of the residents of the room. She mentions all except Eloise Vashner.
• Mrs. Purdy and Mrs McCool chat about the room. She praises Mrs. Purdy for not telling the young man about the events of the room in the past week for the sake of business, while the young man is lying dead upstairs.