Jack does it again

Once again, Jack has shocked me with his wisdom and the profound nature of his observations. This is, of course, not the first time, as I was previously taken aback by his vocabulary, literacy, and ability to face the unknown so trustingly. Recently, I was impressed by this question:

. . . I bang my head on a faucet.

“Careful.”

Why do persons only say that after the hurt? (283)

This, to me, really captures a predominant theme of the novel. Once Ma and Jack have escaped Room, they find their own struggles in dealing with Outside. One of Ma’s is that people are celebrating their escape so much without paying any attention to those suffering in similar situations. When Jack highlights society's lack of forewarning and tendency towards useless advice after the fact, it reminded me of Ma’s complaints during her interview. Though she didn’t complain about the fact that nobody found the shed suspicious in the seven years she was locked in there, it certainly would've been reasonable to do so. If people care so much about Jack and Ma once they’re out of Room, it makes you wonder what efforts they made to recover them in the interim between Ma’s capture and their escape. As Jack says, they’re seemingly only concerned for Jack and Ma “after the hurt.”

As I mentioned before, Ma expresses her concern for those still in isolation during her interview:

“Her hand is pointing at the puffy-hair woman. “As for kids--there’s places where babies lie in orphanages five to a cot with pacifiers taped into their mouths, kids getting raped by Daddy every night, kids in prisons, whatever, making carpets till they go blind--” (235-236)

Just like with Jack and Ma, it’s an all-too-common phenomenon that society will celebrate a heroic story of somebody escaping their abysmal circumstances without bothering to combat the root of the problem. Jack, in his innocent, curious, and subtly profound way highlighted what is one of the most deeply rooted problems with Outside.

Critical Mass

The situation in Room has evidently reached a tipping point—Ma has revealed more about the world to Jack in the last few days than she had in the previous five years. But why? What happened to cause such cataclysmic reveals about Jack’s reality?

Well, it all seems to start with Jack’s birthday. Literarily speaking, it’s not surprising that this is the starting point of the novel: if we jumped in the story before his birthday, we’d just get more of their daily routine than we need, and we’d miss important events if we came in after his birthday. But what about a birthday makes it such a significant starting point?

First of all, a birthday is a time when everyone is very much aware of the passage of time. Even though nothing in particular changes, it’s been a whole year since the last birthday; it gets you thinking about what all has happened since then. Jack succinctly summarizes what’s already happened: “Today I’m five. . . . Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero” (3). Ma, on the other hand, has obviously been more aware of the time passing than Jack has been. For her, this birthday marks yet another year that she has been confined to a workhouse by a psychopathic kidnapper. This unfortunate milestone certainly does nothing to set Ma at ease and probably renews her thoughts about how to try escaping from the room.

Jack, not disturbed by his birthday as Ma is, discovers a newfound responsibility and sense of self-assurance once he turns five. He wants to make his own decisions:

                “Either way would be fun. Will I choose for you?” asks Ma.

                “Now I’m five, I have to choose” (4).

(Above, they’re talking about when Jack will receive Ma’s present for him.)

Jack also wants answers to his questions and presumably presses for them more than he has before. When he sees the bottle of painkillers in a TV commercial, he doesn’t drop his question when Ma tries to play down its importance.

            “But the bottle, how did he get it?”

            “I don’t know.”

The way she says it, it’s strange. I think she’s pretending. “You have to know. You know everything.”

            “Look, it doesn’t really matter.”

            “It does matter and I do mind.” I’m nearly shouting.

            “Jack—“

            Jack what? What does Jack mean?

            Ma leans back on the pillows. “It’s very hard to explain.”

            I think she can explain, she just won’t. “You can, because I’m five now” . . . (59).

Jack suspects that Ma is holding something back and thinks that Ma can tell him now that he’s five. In this way, Jack’s personal sense of entitlement and ability to process new information has grown.

As we’ve discussed, Ma surely knows that she can’t hold the illusion that Room is all that exists forever, so it was really just a question of when it would break down. Jack’s birthday and all the change that comes raining down with it seem to be the formula which ultimately created the events of this novel. Now the only question is: what next?