Room by Emma Donoghue

Tonight at the 2016 Academy Awards, Brie Larson will most likely win her first Oscar for her performance as “Ma” in Room. The film is based on Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel of the same name, which tells the story of a young woman who is abducted in her teens and forced to live for years in a twelve-foot square room with her young son, Jack – the product of rape by her abductor.The interesting thing about Room though is that it is narrated by the five-year old boy. A child narrator in an adult novel is highly unusual, especially for a novel such as Room which deals with some very heavy themes and issues that are quite sensitive considering that the author came up with the story after being exposed to stories of real women who were kidnapped and held hostage for years.
In such a depressing novel, Jack definitely functions almost as a beacon of innocence – not only in an individualistic and moral sense, but also in a much, much wider sense that reflects how he has been shielded by the love of his mother and has not been tainted or corrupted by influences of the world outside the room in which he has lived all his life. The novel’s opening lines show this warmth and innocence and mark the point where the reader learns that Jack’s voice telling the story is a device meant to buffer us from the deeper horrors of the tale: “Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra.”
However, that quote also shows us the main thing wrong with Room. The child narrator obviously speaks like a child and has a child’s understanding of the world, so his presentation of complex actions, emotions and ideas are filtered by him and reduced to childlike simplicities before being presented to the reader. So, Ma’s days of ill health and severe depression are simply referred to as days when Ma is “gone” and the screaming “game” Ma gets them to play is in Jack’s mind just a game but in reality it is his mother’s furtive attempt to get someone on the outside to hear them by having them both scream as loudly as possible for several minutes each day. Furthermore, Ma has reduced Jack’s already limited understanding of the world by leading him to believe (as a form of protection) that everything outside of room that they see on the television (including the ocean, dogs and trees) are unreal and only the things in the room are real. Jack’s narrative voice is difficult to understand at times because of his age and because his own understanding of the situation is so limited.
Halfway through the novel, after the intense and well-written escape scenes, Jack and Ma are restored to the outside world and although the reader might think the rest of the story consists simply of happy scenes highlighting the joys of freedom, Donoghue tempers these by including the many difficulties of readjusting to life in society, of reconnecting with people, of learning the ways of the world again, and building a new life while coming to terms with the harsh reality that was the past.