Homelessness and Transience Theme Analysis

“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.