Light Symbol Analysis

Throughout “The Furnished Room,” the presence of light mirrors the young man’s hope. He arrives at the building of rental rooms “after dark,” suggesting that his hope is already at a low point after five months of seeking Eloise without success. However, upon entering the house, a “faint light from no particular source” wards off the shadows in the hallway. This represents the young man’s faint but groundless hope that this new building will hold some clue in his search for Eloise. When, by chance, such a clue reveals itself in the form of Eloise’s perfume, the young man regains a small piece of hope, which he seizes desperately: he runs to the housekeeper’s door, which “show[s] a crack of light,” to ask her about Eloise. The crack of light is as thin and fragile as the young man’s hope, and this last piece is extinguished when the housekeeper again denies Eloise’s presence in the house. Now that the young man is devoid of hope, his final act is to turn off the light in his room––and it is the lightless gas lamp which he uses to kill himself. In this way, light’s symbolic connection to hope transitions to an inverse connection between darkness and hopelessness, as the light becomes the method of the young man’s suicide.