1. Introduction
Olga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual of the highest order. She has twice won the Nike Award, Poland’s highest literary honor, and in 2018 received both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize. Her major novels include Primeval and Other Times, Flights, and House of Day, House of Night. Her writing is distinguished by its beautiful prose, richness of detail, and concern for the world and human nature, as well as its skillful blending of myth, history, reality, and dream. In her fragmented narratives, a gentle and extraordinary force stirs through her fiction, full of imagination.
“Room Number” is a distinctive short story by Tokarczuk, collected in the short story collection The Wardrobe. “Room Number” follows a hotel worker through a single day, and the plot can be summarized in one sentence: a hotel housekeeper cleans six rooms and then goes home. It is brief, tightly written, philosophically rich, and deeply thought-provoking. Of the three short stories collected in The Wardrobe, though I cannot claim to have understood the other two clearly, “Room Number” stood out as an unmistakably superior reading experience. It breaks away from conventional narrative structure and dramatic conflict; without a gripping plot, it still manages to provoke genuine reflection through its descriptions of one room after another.
2. The Mixture of Persons
Tokarczuk has a preference for first-person narration. In her Nobel Prize lecture, she argued that first-person narrative is a uniquely powerful mode of expression — “the most natural, the most humane, the most truthful” — placing the narrator in a singular position to tell her own story and perspective. “Room Number” is no exception. In the story, “I” is a hotel housekeeper, and the narrative begins as “I” starts work, entering the first room to clean.
2.1 The Disappearance of the Narrator
The opening paragraph’s enumeration of objects and service staff, in addition to establishing the hotel’s atmosphere, repeats the phrase “for them” a full six times — all in preparation for the opening line: “The Grand Hotel attracted only the wealthy.” Here, objects and service staff share the same function: serving the wealthy guests of the Grand Hotel. The silent elevator allows guests to enjoy rapid vertical travel without noise. The fingerprint-free brass door handles convey prestige. The carpeted staircase offers an alternate route up or down. Sofas, bedding, breakfast, air conditioning, towels, soap, shampoo, toilets, and magazines all serve to improve the resident’s quality of life in one way or another; doormen, errand boys, and the various other staff exist only to make the guest’s stay more convenient, the environment more immaculate, and the guest’s status more resplendent. “I” appears at the tail end of the first paragraph, as one among many unremarkable room attendants — given no more description than the carpeted staircase.
And yet, even a description as spare as “making my way through the corridors in a pink-and-white uniform” is enough to make the narrator worry in the next paragraph’s opening sentence that she has already said too much about herself. From the narrator’s removal of her “earrings, extravagant makeup and high heels” before putting on a checkered apron, we can roughly infer that the narrator is a woman — and this is nearly the only evidence offered of her identity, reducible to one basic statement: she is a room attendant.
Here, although the narrator still speaks in her own voice about what she sees and hears, for most of the time she seems to deliberately strip away her original identity — as the second paragraph’s opening sentence states: “When I was changing into my checkered apron in the little cubicle at the end of the corridor, there was nothing left to say about me.” Her original identity is of no importance to the reader; during working hours, which constitute the overwhelming majority of the story, she has no need of personal characteristics. She exists simply as one room attendant among many, or as a figure observing the world, a camera — almost an offstage voice.
The “I” at work disappears into the hotel. As the subject moving through different scenes and engaging in reflection, “I” traverses the world of room numbers as something close to a third-person narrator. Some scholars have even argued that this represents Tokarczuk’s distinctive “fourth-person narration”:
The narrator of this story is “I,” a room attendant, who moves through the various rooms of the Grand Hotel, picking up traces of the guests’ presence; at the same time, “I” observes everything from the perspective of the rooms themselves, using a rich imagination to fill in the guests’ absence. (S, 2020) 1
2.2 The Reappearance of the Narrator
2.2.1 Tea Time
During a cleaning break on the hotel’s second floor — “tea time” — the other staff are resting and chatting briefly. Here another clue to the erasure of self-identity appears: the narrator’s exchange with her colleagues. The only thing “I” says is: “Pedro, what is your mother tongue?” This is a question directed at the self and at identity. When Pedro hears it, there is a “brief absence of mind” — he is engaging, for the first time in a while, in self-examination, recalling who he was before he became a service worker. This act suddenly frightens the narrator, and she does not dare ask any more. When Margalite arrives and the conversation fractures, words come apart, leaving only noise, until the staff members fully disperse and everyone falls into silence.
2.2.2 Thirteen
“Thirteen” is the sum of the digits of “229.” Room 229 symbolizes “excess and lies” and uncertainty. This time, the narrator encounters a person sitting at a computer, working. It is the first moment in which the narrator directly interacts with a guest, in both action and dialogue. The narrator regards the guest as an obstacle, a disruptor of order, a source of pressure. The guest’s questions to the narrator mirror the same identity interrogation the narrator earlier directed at Pedro, forcing her to recall who she is beyond the role of room attendant. Yet the interaction with the guest yields no clues to the reader about her identity — Tokarczuk does not disclose the narrator’s ethnicity — and in fact deepens the erasure of the service worker’s selfhood. Similarly, the narrator expresses resistance to this original identity: “I never wanted to see him again,” hinting at the narrator’s avoidance of any trace that might revive the memory of her self beyond the role.
3. Chapter Breaks as Both Body Text and Subheadings
With the exception of the first subheading, “In the Hotel,” all other chapter breaks in the story function simultaneously as body text and as subheadings. Traditional chapter breaks are either purely numerical, as in Milan Kundera’s Slowness and Mishima Yukio’s Spring Snow, or self-contained units distinct from the body text, as in Hesse’s Siddhartha and Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death. Here, Tokarczuk employs a highly innovative technique: the sentence before each chapter break is left incomplete, running continuously into the bold centered heading beneath it, so that body text and subheading merge.
3.1 A Long Take Resembling Birdman
Birdman is a black comedy directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Michael Keaton, winner of four Academy Awards at the 87th ceremony, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. The story follows a faded superhero actor who, out of love for performance, adapts, directs, and stars in a stage adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, yearning for recognition. The accidents, conflicts, and character interactions that run through the rehearsal process are steeped in absurdism and magical realism, making the film original, funny, and more literary than most. Birdman uses fluid long takes to connect multiple scenes and time periods without leaving the audience feeling that the transitions are too abrupt; its incredibly precise cinematography is both sustained and sweeping, lending epic emotional force to this portrait of an individual’s predicament.
A similar long take operates in “Room Number” with a comparable form and function. It removes temporal jumps, leaving only the succession of scenes. In the story, the chapter breaks that function simultaneously as body text and subheadings also mark the movement of the camera, making shifts in scene concrete. The opening “In the Hotel” presents the hotel’s overall exterior; then the camera moves deeper into the hotel, the frame changing from the whole building to its second floor: “The entire second floor is mine.” After preparations in the storeroom, the scene “shifts” again, and the narrator enters the “world of room numbers.” The subsequent listing of room numbers maps the narrator’s path through the rooms: first cleaning “Room 224,” then resting during “tea time” on the intermediate floor, before returning to her floor to clean “the remaining rooms” — Rooms 226 and 227. The narrator then moves to Room 223, occupied by “several young Americans,” and to Room 229, whose digits sum to “thirteen,” before descending the spiral staircase to the basement. The story concludes after the narrator cleans “the last room,” Room 228, then reclaims herself and leaves the hotel. Time is not the governing logic here; its function, as in Birdman, is to connect different scenes and to heighten the sense of reality.
4. The Hotel: Bringing the Backstage to the Front
Returning, finally, to the content and ideas of the story. Erving Goffman proposed the concept of “dramaturgy,” arguing that social members engage in “impression management” on the stage of social life, constructing their own images. The performance space of a social actor is divided into front stage and backstage: the front stage is the part the audience can observe; the backstage is what they cannot. In “Room Number,” the hotel is a vivid place — the characters reveal themselves uninhibitedly in their rooms, and the furnishings display their tastes and personalities. Here, the hotel rooms function as the characters’ backstage: in their rooms, the characters step away from their public roles, freely enjoying the hotel’s services and indulging their leisure time. For the reader, however, the hotel is the observable front stage, and the different arrangements in each room display each character’s individual allure. The narrator, acting as a kind of audience, presents to the reader the details she observes in each room, and from those details spins her reflections and associations.
Room 200: the female guests have made it a substitute for home. They expose the traces of their makeup, “shamelessly leaving behind their desires and their disorder.” Women, unlike men, treat the world as a theater and take pleasure in the performance; men exchange money for freedom and everything else.
Room 224: the polite Japanese couple are the polar opposite of the previous guests — they leave no trace behind, “as if they had never existed.” They are extremely courteous and sincere, to the point of inspiring the narrator’s guilt and admiration. The author uses her description of the Japanese couple to convey her respect for the “different ways of being” found in Eastern and Western cultures.
Room 226: the Arab guest is reduced to “the reason all these objects are here.” The author expresses concern and scrutiny regarding the relationship between objects — or consumption — and people. In a vein similar to Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, Tokarczuk focuses on the falseness of objects and the helplessness of watching them replace human presence.
Room 227: the guest’s decadence and deterioration are hard for the narrator to bear. Yet the male guest’s fear of aging and his resentment of the world evoke the narrator’s sympathy. This despair, failure, and pain awaken the narrator’s maternal instinct, and she quietly forgives him. In the end, narrator and guest are reconciled, and the narrator turns her gaze toward the future.
Room 223: the American youths’ chaotic groundlessness and amorality repel the narrator. The author also uses this to satirize America’s perpetual disorder — even though the narrator admires and misses America, the entirely unnecessary and entirely meaningless mess the Americans bring leaves her with a headache. This chaos is childish yet vigorous, a symbol of war. Room 223 functions simultaneously as a battlefield and as a room; the author rejects its battlefield identity and upholds its identity as a room. The Americans’ energy and their dreamlike experience of life infect the narrator, prompting her too to begin musing on the impermanence of existence.
Room 229 needs no elaboration here. Room 228: a Swedish woman wishes to die here. The room lacks passion, pervaded instead by an aged forgiveness, peace, and devotion. This atmosphere differs subtly from the scent of life — but this is precisely the eternity of the cycle.
5. Conclusion
Tokarczuk’s short fiction is structurally precise, intellectually deep, and linguistically subtle. The technique of “Room Number” is distinctive and illuminating; the tenderness and passion in her writing cross the boundary of the millennium, leaving an extraordinarily rich legacy for the modern reader. I hope that by dissecting the work of a master, I can strengthen my own narrative architecture and powers of storytelling, and one day write to the emotional depths of contemporary life.