Furnished Room Analysis

In the post-war period, the art of the short story flourished in American literature. Among its most respected practitioners was Flannery o’ connor who renewed the fascination of such giants as Faulkner and Twain with the American south, developing a distinctive southern gothic esthetic wherein characters acted at one level as people and at another symbols.
Most of the authors interested to give many moralistic short stories in American literature. In this session we have to discuss about two short stories based as the theme of isolation. That the novels are The Furnished Room by o’ Hendry and The Tell-Tale Heart by Poe. Both the stories we have the unnamed narrators. The characters are not named in both the stories. The two narrators of

Edgar Allen Poe is trying to convince the readers that the main character feels guilty for killing the old man. There are many parts in the story where Poe wants the reader to understand that even though the main character seems foolish he still feels sorrow. That the theme of the story clearly gives as isolate because of the crime. The author depicted the theme by using the unnamed character. This is largely a study in human terror experienced on two levels, both depressing to observe. First, there is the narrator, the maniac, driven by his compulsive hatred of the “evil eye” to kill a man he says he loved. He is a case study in madness, tormented by that satanic eye that he simply must destroy. His madness is quite convincing and profoundly disturbing because it seems so capricious and meaningless. Indeed, seldom has the mystery and the horror of mental illness been so vividly portrayed. The “eye” also has a double meaning. The narrator is driven to self-destruction, though his suicidal urges are objectified in the old man’s diseased

Henry’s best-known stories. Although the basic ironic plot can be summarized in a sentence a young man commits suicide in the same room where a young woman for whom he has vainly searched killed herself it is the musty atmosphere of the room and the suggestion that every place bears the traces of the lives that have inhabited it that makes the story so compelling. It is a story of transience, of lives that move through a bleak, indifferent world, leaving only bits of themselves, which the young man uncovers as he searches through drawers and pokes into every corner and crevice of the room looking for something that remains of the woman he seeks. However, all that is left is an illusory sweet familiar smell, which melodramatically becomes the sweet smell of the gas he turns on in despair, as she did only one week previously. Although the fact that the young man ends up in the very same room in which his lost sweetheart took her life is one of the most extreme coincidences in all of O. Henry’s fiction, the power of the atmosphere of the story is so strong that readers are willing to accept