Hope vs. Hopelessness Theme Analysis

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.