room that he is now in. Here, we observe a very dark form of dramatic irony, where the one landlady is essentially congratulating the other, noting that it would be poor business sense to be telling would-be renters of suicides. All the while, the two landladies remain unaware of the second suicide being carried out in the very same room.

Additionally, I would suggest that this turn of events has an element of situational irony as well, when seen from the landlady's perspective: the landlady withheld this information from the renter to ensure he would take the room. While it is not quite clear how things would have proceeded had he known the truth about the young woman's suicide, that decision to withhold the information from him contributed directly to the renter's despair and thus to his own suicide that followed.

The reveal at the end of "The Furnished Room" is a textbook example of dramatic irony. The protagonist, having searched tirelessly for an excruciating amount of time for his lover, visits the room to continue his search. He asks the owner of the rooms for rent if she has seen his lover, but she responds that she has not. We learn that the protagonist inquires after his lovers whereabouts everywhere he goes, and always the answer is "no." As he lies down in his room, he is met with a scent that is distinctly his lover's. He looks around frantically for any sign of her, but finds none. The housekeeper is insistent that, within her memory, no woman matching the description has rented the room. In the end, he chooses to end his life by gas poisoning.

The dramatic irony is revealed when the housekeeper is having a conversation with another lady of the house and is being mildly chastised for not telling the renters of the room that a beautiful young lady had killed herself in the room only a week prior. Even more eerie is the fact that she killed herself using the exact same method that the young man is using as the women speak. This, combined with the smell and presence that the young man feels, hints at the supernatural, and is an example of dramatic irony because the audience is privy to key information that the primary character is not and, in this case, never will be.

Much of the irony in "The Furnished Room" is verbal irony. It is to be seen in the contrast between the repellent appearance of the room and the whole building, on the one hand, and the humorous way the narrator describes the place, on the other. For example:

Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. 

The verbal irony is also glaring in the housekeeper's description of the furnished room and its actual condition.

“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It's a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute."

We can imagine what sort of "elegant people" would stay in such a room and in such a building. Evidently the housekeeper, whose name is Mrs. Purdy, has lived in this dingy, decaying building for so long that it looks relatively attractive to her.

The ending of "The Furnished Room" contains a different sort of irony. Once we learn that the girl the young lover has been searching for had committed suicide in the same room he has just rented, we see the dramatic irony of the entire story. The girl gave up trying to survive as an entertainer in the cold, cruel city of New York, and her lover gave up searching for her in the setting where her life had ended only a week before. Both committed suicide with the same gas jet in the same furnished room, a room which seems to have swallowed both of them up and forgotten them.

One example of irony in this story is the revelation at the end of the story that Mrs. Purdy knew that the woman her lodger was looking for died in the same room that he had been occupying. This is an example of dramatic irony, whereby the reader knows something that one of the characters does not, or, in this case (given that the lodger is now dead), did not. This is also a rather tragic irony, as the lodger had, just previous to this moment in the story, been desperately ransacking and destroying his room in an effort to find even some small trace of the woman.

There is also a tragic kind of irony in the similarities between the deaths of the lodger and the woman he was searching for. The lodger had been looking for this woman for five months. These months he described as "Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative." The lodger then came agonizingly close to finding the woman, only to miss her by one week. At the end of the story, the lodger, desperate and hopeless, committed suicide in the room by turning the gas "full on" and laying "gratefully upon the bed." We then find out that the woman he had been searching for also committed suicide in the same room, one week prior to the day, also by turning on the gas. This indeed is a rather macabre, grisly, and tragic irony.