The tone of “The Furnished Room” is a primarily fearful and repulsed one. This comes across in the narrator’s many descriptions of the derelict tenement establishment that houses the furnished room, such as the following:
At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.
The language here is not only critical but has a repulsed tone, as seen in phrases like “that foul and tainted air,” and “the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.” The imagery of “imps and devils” dragging statues of saints into “the darkness” communicates a level of fear on the part of the narrator. This not just a disgusting and decrepit building, but one haunted by demons (and, as readers discover later, ghostly entities). The tone here helps readers understand that these short-term housing options are not comforting or welcoming places to live.
It is worth noting that the tone of the story shifts in its final scene. After the young man kills himself in the furnished room, the narrator essentially disappears and the scene switches to “the subterranean retreats where house-keepers foregather.” The tone that ends the story is the detached, unsympathetic one that the housekeeper and Mrs. McCool use in their conversation about how Eloise killed herself in the young man's room just a week ago. O. Henry’s decision to end the story in this way highlights that landlords at the time did not care about the people to whom they were renting. It also emphasizes the idea that the young man will become just another nameless ghost haunting the building.
