The protagonist of “The Furnished Room,” an unnamed young man, has been searching for his lost love Eloise Vashner for five months with no success. Only his hope that he will one day find her keeps him going. The young man’s hope is reflected in the presence of light throughout the story. When he first enters the house of rental rooms, hopeful there might be some clue to Eloise, the shadows of the halls are “mitigated” by “a faint light from no particular source,” just as the man’s despair is kept at bay by his unfounded faith in finding Eloise. Later, the young man smells Eloise’s perfume in the furnished room, and he believes he might have found her. He rushes to the housekeeper, who is behind “a door that showed a crack of light.” The narrow light mirrors the young man’s last sliver of hope. The housekeeper, though, crushes the young man’s hope that Eloise had stayed in the furnished room. When he returns to the room, the young man sees it as “dead” and empty of “the essence that had vivified it.” Through this language of death and defeat, the story paints the loss of hope as a loss of life––a connection that is strengthened when the young man’s hopelessness ultimately drives him to suicide. After the smell of the perfume disappears, “the ebbing of his hope drain[s] his faith.” The final death of the young man’s last piece of hope is the tipping point for his will to live. After this moment of “draining,” he submits “gratefully” to his death. He extinguishes the light that had symbolized his hope and uses the gas from the darkened lamps to end his life.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Hope vs. Hopelessness ThemeTracker
Hope vs. Hopelessness Quotes in The Furnished Room
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, [...] the strong, sweet odour of mignonette [...] came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance that it almost seemed like a living visitant. [...] The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognizant of the call.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.
The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
