Room

I recently finished Room, by Emma Donoghue.  It is about a girl who was kidnapped sometime around when she was starting college while she was walking through a parking lot, by a crazy, fifty-five-ish year old man.  He kept her in a little garden shed in his backyard with a high security door, and only a sunroof on top with incredibly thick glass.  She was absolutely miserable until about two years into this, she has a son, Jack.  She had nothing to live for, until he came along, and since then she has done her best to raise him in one little room, without any kind of contact to other people, and only what Old Nick (Jack’s name for the crazy old guy,) brings them.  The book starts when Jack is five, his mother has been in Room for seven years, and the book is told from Jack’s perspective.  

First of all, I think that some of the mother’s methods of teaching Jack are very interesting.  He only knows the things within Room, and she tells him that everything else is fake, or “TV”.  He is under the impression that everything he sees on TV (they have access to three random channels) exists only in TV, and that outside of Room there is just empty space.  She tells him things like this because she does not want Jack to know that he is missing out on so much, yet at the same time, the older he gets, the harder it will get for him to understand her when she explains the situation they are really in.  She is both helping and hurting Jack when telling him things like this.  Eventually, he will need to face the truth.  

Because Room is all that Jack has ever known, he perceives it completely differently from his mother.  Jack’s mom grew up in a nice, normal family, she went to school, and was on her way to college when things basically ended for her.  She desperately misses everything in her old life and sees how much they are missing out on.  Jack sees everything else as empty space, because that is what she tells him, so he is under the impression that living in this tiny room is actually pretty great.  As the blurb states, “to five-year-old Jack, Room is the world.”  He does not know anything better, so he enjoys living there.  They have a precise schedule for everything they do during the day, and Jack has names for every piece of furniture in Room.  I think sometimes it hurts Jack’s mother to see him so content with what she knows is so little.  

Near the middle of the book is when Jack really begins to ask questions.  He finds loopholes in his “Ma”’s explanations for everything.  When Jack finds something that troubles Ma or that she cannot explain, he gets pretty freaked out.  Everything in his life so far has been entirely predictable, he knows what will happen, and anything else his Ma can just easily explain.  Now it is getting to the point where Jack is freaking out about everything more and more.  I think that this transformation in Jack is partially what shows Ma that Jack desperately needs to get out of Room.  If they escape know, Room could become a scary memory from his childhood, as opposed to something that majorly alters him for the rest of his life.  

Eventually, they come up with an amazing plan, and save themselves.  Everything changes for both of them.  Jack, for quite a while, is upset and troubled by the fact that there are too many things, people, and places in the world for him to possibly know everyone.  Just the fact that other people are named Jack really freaks him out.  He also hates surprises.  He wishes he was back in Room where everything was controlled.  Jack always wishes for a great sense of stability and control in his life.  He needs to accept that you can be safe and happy, even when there are things that are unknown to you.  

Jack also is not able to relate to people at all.  He only feels comfortable with Ma, and goes crazy when anyone else even makes contact with him.  Jack stays like this for a while.  Eventually, he starts to recover very well.  He is not as hesitant to try new things, or be with other people.  

On the other hand, Jack’s mother does not recover well at all.  I think that she always expected to be able to easily reintegrate into society.  After striving for company for so many years, she thought she would be completely normal when coming back, and worried that Jack would not be able to accept their new life.  When Jack’s mother realizes that it is going to be harder for her than she expected, she becomes deeply sad.  I think that Jack’s mom also feels guilty for how Room might have affected Jack.  Whenever anyone asks anything regarding how she raised Jack, or even complements how well she seems to have done for her limited capability and resources, she takes it as a tremendous insult and begins to defend herself and her parenting.  Near the end of the book, Jack’s mom actually tries to kill herself by overdosing on prescription pills in the middle of the night while Jack is asleep.  

In conclusion, I found the ways in which Jack and his mother, from Room, dealt with issues, both before and after they escaped, to be very interesting.  Although this book was pretty sad, I loved reading it.