The mood of “The Furnished Room” is hopeless and beleaguered at both the start and the end of the story, with a period of hopeful desperation in the middle. The following passage—which comes after the housekeeper tells the young man that she hasn’t seen Eloise—captures the hopeless mood at the beginning of the story:
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for […]. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
The despairing mood comes across in this passage in phrases such as, “Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative,” and, “So much time spent by day in questioning.” The young man is clearly exhausted, and readers can feel that as well. The simile that ends the passage—in which New York City is compared to “a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime”—also communicates a deeply pessimistic mood. That the young man experiences New York as quicksand that is trapping him and covering him in “ooze and slime” shows how far he feels from his goal of finding his lost love.
In a later scene, when the young man believes that he smells traces of Eloise inside the furnished room, there is a moment of hope—and desperate yearning—in the story that is, once again, squelched when the housekeeper lies and says that Eloise was never there. That the young man kills himself—and Eloise, it is revealed, also killed herself in the same room—ends the story on an ultimately hopeless note.
