One of my favorite things about this novel is Jack’s narration. This book operates at a fast pace and really leaves you on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens next, and I think Jack’s voice really adds to this aspect of the story
One of the main reasons Jack’s narration is so attractive is because of how innocent he is. Jack’s worldview is completely unique- one might be able to comprehend Ma’s situation (getting kidnapped and imprisoned), but the idea of living your whole life in one room, and thinking that room is the entire world, is a perspective that no one else shares. Because of this unique perspective, the events that happen seem at times more confusing, but usually they were made more exciting because Jack was narrating them. For example, we followed a few days of Jack in Room, from beginning to end, and despite him never leaving it never got boring. Also, if Ma was narrating this book, there might be points in it that were just too depressing (her headspace can’t be a fun place to be) that are lightened a bit from Jack’s point of view.
Another interesting thing about Jack’s narration is his voice. I live with a six-year-old, so I consider myself to have a pretty good understanding of how little kids’ minds work. One thing you catch onto pretty quickly is that while they often don’t make a lot of sense, younger children have an eerie ability to identify certain things that you might think they’re too young to understand and also are often pretty insightful. Little kids are also endlessly creative- like when Jack thinks of “tricking” Nick. The point is, Jack might not make sense some of the time, but his narration provides us with some incredibly useful elements, like complete truthfulness and certain insights that the reader might not pick up on anyway.
Overall, Jack’s narration is really what makes this novel special. Five-year-olds are generally pretty fun to be around, and in this novel Jack operates as a narrator in a completely unique position. His narration of the latter half of “Dying” is honestly one of the most riveting pieces of thriller fiction I’ve ever read. I’ll be curious to see how his narration affects the last ⅖ of the book!
Cool post! I agree-I really like Jack's narration. I think it makes the book so much more intriguing and scary. To know an 11-by-11 foot space as your entire universe is incomprehensible to many of us. I think that if Ma narrated it, it would be, like you said, much more depressing and perhaps not as unpredictable.
ReplyDeleteJack's narration is really cool. I think that the way that he says things really informs the reader on his character. Emma Donoghue can show us that Jack hasn't left Room without explicitly saying that Jack has never been outside by making common nouns proper. I agree that Jack's narration makes this book special.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that Jack, like other six years olds, have a weird way of understanding things. One moment that was really disturbing for me was when Old Nick was raping Ma and Jack thought that he was stealing her breast milk. Though that might not have been the case, Jack understood that Old Nick was stealing something from Ma.
ReplyDeleteI agree that while Jack's narration originally caught me off-guard, it's now something that I can't imagine this book without. Especially with your point about how his narration of three days in one Room never got boring-- can you imagine reading about those days from any other person's point of view? You'd probably fall asleep after the first page. While Jack's narration makes the could-be boring parts of the story not boring, it also contributes to the more riveting parts as well, such as the Great Escape. In the part where Jack narrates seeing a dog up close for the first time and how it looked so vicious and like a vampire, I got this really gruesome and scary image of a snarling dog with huge, sharp teeth that I probably wouldn't get from any other normal person. So I think that this book really wouldn't be complete without Jack telling its story.
ReplyDeleteThis book might be a total nightmare if it wasn't for Jack's persistent energy and positivity. He narration presents us with a strange situation in which sometimes we understand beyond what he does through his simple presentation of facts -- other times, Jack will have a one-liner that somehow completely cuts to the center of the problem in a way that seems wise beyond his years. This clear-headedness can be kind of hard to relate to in places when you get caught up in the emotional turmoil of the situation, as an older person who can sort of understand what's going on. However, it's Jack's innocent practicality that makes him capable of accomplishing the escape, even with all odds against him.
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting aspect of Jack's narration is the suspense it adds to the narrative. It takes about eighty pages for us to learn what exactly happened to Ma, whereas if she had been narrating her kidnapping would have been explained much earlier. The suspense is key feature of Room, and I think Jack's voice is a major contributor to that tension.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to Jack's narration really making the novel special, in a way it also makes things easier to understand. Not at first, obviously, as the beginning it extremely disorienting, but as the novel goes on and we can speak Jack's "dialect" of English, we have an understanding of how Jack feels. From there, we can use inferences about people that are much easier to relate to, such as Ma, to understand how they are feeling in a given situation. We might catch on a lot sooner to what is going on if the story were narrated from Ma's perspective, but then I don't think we'd be able to understand how Jack is feeling at all, as we have no real frame of reference for him, having lived in Room his entire life.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Jack's narration adds something to this book that no other book I've read has ever had. The beginning of the book, before we know of Jack's whole situation, is almost as enticing as the actual action in the novel. Jack getting excited every morning made me feel just as excited as he was, and trying to figure out the small mysteries that lay within his world (such as why he goes to sleep in Wardrobe but wakes up in Bed) made it literally impossible for me to put the book down.
ReplyDeleteI sort of expect the narration to begin to fall apart and become less coherent than it was before. Jack seemed to be in a good place, or at least in his mind. He was content being in Room with Ma, and he seemed to be "friends" with all the objects in Room. While his initial narration was confusing, it was due to his lack of social interaction. Now that he is going to be suffering from separation anxiety and utter bewilderment, I wouldn't be surprised if the next chapters are extra disorienting.
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