she told him before that it was not his lady friend. When he returns to the room, her fragrance is gone. He tears up the sheets and places the strips around the window.  He turns on the gas and lies down on the bed waiting to die.

In a conversation between the housekeepers, the man’s housekeeper admits that she did not tell him the truth about the last tenant.  It might have kept him from renting the room.  The last renter had committed suicide.  She was pretty except for a mole by her left eyebrow. 

Theme

Hopelessness

After the man has searched all over the town for five months, he gives up his hope. Apparently, he was obsessed with this girl and did not want to live without her.  He faced the large city looking for one lost girl with nothing but negative results.

“The ebbing of his hope drained his faith.  He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight.  Soon he walks to the bed…he drove [the torn sheets] in every crevice around the window…turned on the gas and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.

When he smells her fragrance and was sure that she had been in the room, the denial of the housekeeper pushes him over the edge.  He feels that the girl is gone forever.  Although he does not know it, he is right. She committed suicide in the same bed in which he is going to die. The housekeeper took all of his hope away when she lied to him.

Man must have hope to live.  Without hope, nothing will ever get better.

Isolation and loneliness

The young man feels as though he is facing the world alone.  He is searching for one girl in a city of thousands of girls. 

The room he rents seems to be monstrous in its chipped furniture, distorted couch, and chipped fireplace mantel. “A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.” This is not his room, and he has nothing to show for his life.  He searches the room to find anything that his lost love might have left behind. Like the many other times, he finds nothing.

His isolation from the rest of the world in this terrible place without hope of finding his girl is a life not worth living.

Alone, depressed, isolated, and lonely—the young man no longer wants to fight. He gives up his life.

The theme of "The Furnished Room" is that New York is a cold, heartless city that devours people and destroys their dreams. Many people are drawn here because it is possible to achieve spectacular success, as Carrie Meeber does, for example, in Theodore Dreiser's great novel Sister Carrie. But the majority of people with artistic talents of one kind or another find that the competition is overwhelming. They get worn out with living in the horrible conditions described by O. Henry when the young man follows the housekeeper up the stairs and into the furnished room. Such rooms seem designed to create despair. They get discouraged by all the running around they have to do trying to find a little paying work, whether it be in acting, singing, dancing, writing, drawing, or whatever else. Johnsy and her friend Sue are both good examples of aspiring artists in O. Henry's story "The Last Leaf." Sue is struggling desperately to make living expenses by doing sketches "on spec" for some magazine. Johnsy has given up the struggle and is only waiting to die. The girl the young man is searching for in "The Furnished Room," whose name is Miss Eloise Vashner, came to New York with high hopes, but she gave up just a week ago and committed suicide by the then standard means of turning on the gas without lighting it.

The furnished room in the story is beautifully described in all its ugliness. It symbolizes the lives of the many aspirants who come and go--

Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. 

This rooming house is the end of the line. You can't get any lower than that. And when a person moved into one of these gritty, smelly rooms, it is a good indication that suicide may be the next step down. 

It would seem that Eloise Vashner had enough talent to make her ambition plausible. When the two housekeepers are talking about her at the end of the story:

“She'd a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin' by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”

The mole serves a dual purpose. It identifies her positively as the girl the young man had been seeking. It is also a tiny defect that may have been responsible for her inability to succeed in her chosen career as an entertainer. The competition in show business is so fierce that anything short of perfection is a nearly insurmountable handicap. Today there are countless thousands of talented people, including beautiful girls from every corner of America, flocking to New York and Hollywood with nothing but youth and hopes. They will find that the competition exceeds their worst expectations. 

Another related theme in "The Furnished Room" is that Eloise Vashner should have stayed in whatever small town she came from, married this young man who so obviously loved her, and settled for a simple life in a little house with a family, a rose garden, and some friendly neighbors.

Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.

This quote from "The Furnished Room" suggests that O. Henry was in the habit of inventing stories to suit settings. A neighborhood and a partiicular rooming house such as he describes in detail in "The Furnished Room" could suggest characters and situations to a man with his remarkable imagination. In this case it is a young woman who has apparently vanished and a young man who is trying to find her. The spooky landlady is the third character necessary to complete the tale.

It is challenging to look at some of O. Henry's other stories and guess whether they too emanated from a setting and the unique mood which that setting evoked. He may have seen a man smoking a cigar in the darkened doorway of a closed hardware store and invented the characters in "After Twenty Years" to populate the stage that was already set for them. Why would a well-dressed man be standing in a darkened doorway in a deserted neighborhood? He must be waiting for someone--but why there?

O. Henry's story "The Last Leaf" begins with a description of a different New York neighborhood in the same perceptive and evocative manner as that of the red brick district of the lower West Side in "The Furnished Room."

IN A LITTLE district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called “places.”

A bum sleeping under a mound of newspapers on a bench in Washington Square may have inspired the creation of "Soapy" and his efforts to get himself thrown in jail.

Another great short story writer who derived as least some of his ideas from settings and the moods they evoked was Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). In his excellent story "Minuet," the French author creates two old people who are living relics of the opulent era before the French Revolution. The man was a dancing master and his wife was a leading court dancer. They come every day to the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris because it reminds them of their youth and the ancien regime. At the request of the man who is narrating the story, they dance the minuet to show him what it was like. The dancing master tells the narrator:

"The minuet, monsieur, is the queen of dances, and the dance of queens, do you understand? Since there is no longer any royalty, there is no longer any minuet."

Maupassant created the whole story out of nothing but the bare setting of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he liked to walk in solitude and think about story ideas. Like O. Henry, Maupassant was a prolific writer who was always under pressure to meet deadlines. There is no surprise ending to Maupassant's story. He did not always surprise his readers, as he does in his famous story "The Necklace." At the end of "The Minuet" the elderly couple stops dancing, and the illusion of being back in the time before the French Revolution abruptly vanishes.

They suddenly stopped. They had finished all the figures of the dance. For some seconds they stood opposite each other, smiling in an astonishing manner. Then they fell on each other's necks sobbing.