Ma's Perspective

            The novel Room features a unique perspective of narration. The main character and narrator is Jack, a five year old who has grown up his entire life in an eleven by eleven foot room. Emma Donoghue’s choice to have Jack as the narrator brings many features to the book. The brokenness of Jack’s thoughts and his incorrect grammar clearly demonstrate the fact that he is five years old. This promotes a closer connection between Jack and the reader whereas a narration from Ma’s perspective could have painted Jack as a side character. His thoughts not only point to his age but also show that he has been isolated from the world. He describes everything from an objective viewpoint. Because of this, the reader sees both how he thinks and plot elements in an interesting way.

            The most important aspect of reading Room from Jack’s perspective is understanding how much of an effect growing up in isolation has had on his mentality. At the beginning of the novel, he does not know of any existence outside of “Room”. Because of the lies Ma had to tell him, he has trouble distinguishing from fiction and reality. The obscureness of his mindset would be impossible to capture from any perspective except his own. Even though Ma knows practically everything about Jack, she is not able to see things from his point of view. Knowing the way Jack approaches the world makes all his feats stunningly impressive.

            Although I do agree with the decision to narrate the novel from Jack’s irreplaceable perspective, I think that it is interesting to consider the novel from Ma’s perspective. The section titled “Dying” features Jack’s daring escape from Old Nick as he runs out into a world he has never encountered and a loneliness apart from Ma that instills an alarming distress in him. However, the escape is just as much a heroic expedition for Ma as for Jack. Ma is the orchestrator of the escape and has partially been planning the escape for the seven years she has been trapped in “Room”. The escape captures Ma’s bravery because, unlike Jack, she knows the grave consequences of failure.

Ma’s perspective is a much bleaker and gloomy presentation of their predicament, without the delusional optimism and never-ending excitement of a five year old child. The differences between Ma and Jack’s mentalities are apparent throughout the entire book and demonstrated with clarity when they are planning their Plan B escape. Jack is practicing pretending to be dead, but he keeps breaking out into giggles. To Jack, pretending to be dead is not easily distinguished from playing dead in their game “Corpse”. It is hard for him to separate games from real life. The scene from Ma’s perspective would undoubtedly include her musings over the consequences of their actions. She knows how unstable of a condition Old Nick is in and how easily the escape plan could fail. To Ma, Plan B is their last chance at escape and a matter of life and death.

Ma’s narration would also more extensively cover the realities of living in “Room”. Primarily in the earlier parts of the novel, Jack’s portrayals of their activities are skewed by his limited understanding of how they fit into the broader context of the world. From Jack’s perspective, every weekday they play a game called “Scream” where they shout at the top of their lungs towards the skylight. When reading this scene from Jack’s perspective, it is not quite clear what is going on at first. It eventually becomes clear that this is an attempt at attracting attention for escape. If this section were narrated by Ma, the reasoning behind this “game” would at once be clear. Ma’s narration would capture her sheer desperation.

The possibility that fascinates me the most about Ma’s narration is her portrayal of Old Nick. From Jack’s perspective, Old Nick is mysterious. At first, Jack is not even sure if Old Nick is human. Old Nick sways between the polar opposites of a god and a villain to Jack. Ma’s portrayal of Old Nick would provide readers with a much more detailed description of Old Nick. Our introduction to Old Nick would be as a kidnapper, rather than a mythical present bearer. Ma knows a lot about Old Nick’s life through their seven years of conversations that is not provided to the reader.