“The Furnished Room” begins not with its protagonist, but with the “restless, shifting, fugacious” transients of the Lower West Side. The significance of impermanence, specifically as it pertains to housing, carries throughout the story. The housekeeper implicitly links a person’s housing status with their identity when she remarks, “Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms.” The narrative ties a lack of permanent housing to a lack of personal stability, but it does not cast blame on New York’s homeless population for their lack of stability. The city itself makes a solid sense of security impossible; it is “like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation.” This lack of foundation is felt by all the characters in the story. The housekeeper and Mrs. McCool are constantly renting rooms to rapidly-changing guests in order to stay alive, and the protagonist has been wandering for five months in search of the woman he loves. The theme of transience continues within the furnished room itself. The narrator suggests the room’s past guests could treat it so poorly because it is only their home temporarily. In fact, the narrator suggests, perhaps it is the impermanence of their residence that incites “the cheated home instinct…, the resentful rage at false household gods.” In one’s own home, a person “can sweep and adorn and cherish,” but being forced to rent a cheap room reminds the residents of their own transience. Transience, then, becomes a state of emotional turmoil as well as physical discomfort. The emotional impacts of a life without stability are seen at the end of the story, when the young man takes his own life. Through the untimely death of its protagonist, the story depicts life itself as temporary and transient.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Homelessness and Transience ThemeTracker
Homelessness and Transience Quotes in The Furnished Room
Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself, is a certain vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients for ever –– transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing ‘Home Sweet Home’ in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
[Theatrical people] comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes. [...] Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes.
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 today buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury –– perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness –– and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised [...]. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
