英语书评《带家具出租的房间》

Money isn't everything
-A Review of the Furnished Room
陈敏15314017
The Furnished Room is one of the short stories written by an America writer, William Sydney Porter, who was known by his pen name O. Henry. Henry's short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings. And so is this book The Furnished Room.
Now let‟s talk about the story.This is perhaps the bleakest of O. Henry‟s best-known stories.A young man rented a house from a woman housekeeperin a New York City. The woman told the young man how good the furnished room was but lied to him about the tenants living here before.When the young man asked whether his lover Eloise Vashner had lived here before, whom he had been constantly searching for, the housekeeper denied. However, when resting in the room, he sensed her flavor around him. He began searching the room from cellar to rafter, trying to find sighs that suggested his lover had been living here before, but failed hopelessly. He sealed the room with strips, turned on the gas, laid in bed and waited for death. What surprised us is the ending. Through the conversation between the housekeeper and another woman, we know that his lover Vashner had died in the same room using the same suicide way as the man.
One of the strengths of this novel I want to mention is that Henry has a good command of using wonderful description. The plot is simple, which can be easily summarized in a sentence, but it is the description about the indifferent world that impressed us more.“Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever--transients in abode, transients in heart and mind.”These sentences created ascene of a depressed society. Transient lives moved through a bleak indifferent world. Beneath such society, so were the people.“To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill thevacancy with edible lodgers.”What‟ more, the musty atmosphere of the room and the suggestion that every place bears the traces of the lives inhabited it that makes the story compelling. “The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.” Although the fact that the young man ends up in the very same room in which his lost lover took her life is one of the most extreme coincidences in all of O. Henry‟s fiction, I think it is the strong power of the descriptionsand the analogy that moved every readers.[1] Although we coul dn‟t attribute the man…s death to the woman, yet we still can easily conclude the author‟s attitude towards the woman, who is a representative of a kind of crowd that put interests above everything else. Henry used “an unwholesome, surfeited worm“to describe the selfish, cold-bloodedpetty bourgeois. Apparently, he showed his distaste for this kind of people. The woman hushed up the fact that inside the room had died a young woman and still rent out the room, driven by her heart chasing money first. Maybe whether the woman told the man about the death of the young girl or not, the man would choose to suicide himself finally, but this concealment is disrespect both to the dead and to the lodger. I think this criticism is the overall theme inside the book.
Maybe nowadays chasing money is a popular trend in society, but please do remember, the society will surely be destroyed if everyone only believes in money. It‟s true that we can‟t live without money, but there are always a lot of other things that much more significant than money.
Just as Bennet Cerf and Van Cartmell said, “O. Henry's stories are gems of their kind; mellow, humorous, ironic, ingenious and shot through with that eminently salable quali ty known as 'human interest.'”, I recommend Henry‟s novels to all of you, which can arouse your deep thought about the life.
Reference Documentation
[1] The Furnished Room. O. Henry。