The Furnished Room

The furnished room is the one representative story of O. Henry, a great American short story writer, whose writing style is usually and humorous. But in The furnished room ,the author use the serious words ,sharp irony and depressed atmosphere to make a sad story.
The tragedy short story The Furnished Room is about a young man who commits suicide in a room he rents. He has searched for his sweetheart fruitlessly for five months, with a hope that he can find her in the house he lives. But for the purpose of making profit, the landlady doesn’t tell him the truth that his girlfriend kills herself in the same room a week ago. At the end the young man dies in despair. The story is divided into two parts. The first part concerns his failure in search for his sweetheart, the odor of mignonette, the lie of the landlady ,and the suicide. The second part reveals the truth and produces the surprise ending through the conversation between the landlady, that his sweetheart had, a week earlier, committed suicide in the same room.

The short story is really a tragedy and “irony of fate”. The author presents the story not simply in order to appraise the young man’s true love for the girl, , but also to reveal the truth that the capital society makes some people cold-hearted. They are so realistic and cruel that they only care about their own profit without concerning others’ emotion and life.
In the story, we have been told that the young man has been searching for her for five months, and he is not only momentarily tired physically, but spiritually weary. Indeed, we are told:“ he was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of today buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.” After entering the furnished room, the young man, physically weak, is under the illusion that he has been called by his beloved girl. He