blog




  • Essay / A Glimpse of Trauma in Room and The Outsider

    Room is a traumatic novel, about a young woman who longs to protect her only child from the kidnapper who has imprisoned them both in a small shed for seven years. Donoghue's writing is able to place the reader in the terrifying experiences witnessed by such a young mind. As readers see through the eyes of a child who has a blank understanding of the world around him, they are quickly able to fill in the gaps with what is really happening. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. Jack is Ma's son who has the comprehension skills of an infant. describing only what he sees and hears. The inanimate objects that occupy the room become characters for him, such as the sink, the table, the toothbrush and the bathtub. Jack views the weekly deliveries of supplies to Room as Sunday treats rather than viewing these deliveries as a necessity for survival and a somewhat normal life. In Room, Donoghue captures a child's point of view, as the terrors, observations and oddities that only a child is capable of understanding come to life in his work. When their captor Old Nick arrives, Jack hides in the closet and counts the creaks of the bed until Jack hears the sound of Old Nick's orgasm and stops. Donoghue cleverly lets his audience make the jump between Jack's innocent observations and the harsh reality in Room. This limited perspective creates an important contradiction: for My Room is a place of terror, but for Jack, it is the only house he knows, where all his imaginary friends live. And no matter how she tries to make him understand, he can't understand the trauma she's been through and how much she longs for the outside. For him, outside is just another word for space. Jack is only able to understand horror situations through the stories his mother tells him. His mother is forced to remain sedentary in imaginary worlds. Alice in Wonderland is used to represent how they are transformed as slaves to a familiar world in hopes of one day being freed from madness, only to fall into another dead end. While Dora the Explorer is used to give them both the courage to break free from slavery. The battle unfolds with a petrified mother grappling with the watch, forced to explain what she herself has little knowledge to her harmless son, to save herself from their intimidating referee. This novel is criticized by many as being a purely traumatic experience, especially when mother and son only have one chance to escape. Donoghue shows the true horror of these experiences, directly addressing the question of "what happens next", rather than leaving it as an open question to be ignored. Donoghue's audience is plunged into the claustrophobia of Room, everything goes horribly wrong, and even readers are torn between Jack's desire to stay where he feels safe and Ma's desire to escape and return home. The truth about “what happens next” is difficult to face for all the characters involved. From the moment they are rescued, Ma and Jack are hounded by journalists, doctors and unaccommodating family members. In many ways, readers see how Room represented safety for Jack, while outside is where life is new and foreign. Where Jack can't be with his mother 24/7, where people are strangers, and where Jack can bleed. In the sequel, Donoghue introduces a welcome element of satire; Since all Jack knows about the outside world is what he sees on television, he can't relate to anything about the outside world unless he imagines them as characters on an animal planet, a fitness planet, a planet cartoon, etc. He is a stranger to the world. and takes his first courageous steps towards becoming a more independent individual. Another target of Donoghue's subtle mind is the cult of motherhood. We have not often seen in literature a maternal dependence greater than that of the boy who lived in a single room with his mother, breast-fed well into his sixth year. Readers are shocked. However, even though Ma has failed to wean him, she is still determined. Until a woman named Barbara Walters came in and asked him live on national television about breastfeeding. All things considered, Donoghue leaves his audience with two opposing thoughts. On one side of the spectrum, Jack has slowly but surely adapted to the outdoors. Including all the stimuli that assail him from all sides, to become a full-fledged individual. Mom, on the other side. Is left with the uncomfortable idea that she will simply move from prison to prison for the rest of her life. Additionally, readers might conclude that perhaps Mom never truly loved her son, Jack the way she still loved him... born a girl. In one revealing sequence, she mindlessly recounts the old psychological experiment about monkeys separated from their mothers and fed only through a drain, how they withered away from the absence of love, not the absence basic needs. Later, even she agrees with Jack's assessment that even the love of their human captors could have been enough to feed these apes. This disturbing exchange is a metaphor. Jack replaces the human kidnapper. They serve each other as love machines, but once they are released from captivity, Ma realizes how clinically she has approached her child's care, ignoring the real emotional needs of herself or her child. son. To some extent, she feels like she used him. However, Ma would never have thought this without the accusatory interrogation mentioned above. The play is described in Jack's voice, but it is Joy's story. Jack's birth is what saves Joy again and again: "Before I came, you watched TV all day and you cried and cried. Then I zoomed through the skylight from the sky...you cut the cord and said, "Hello, Jack." » » With this hello, Joy was no longer alone. Hope, however, is fragile in a person who has been repeatedly raped and terrorized with no way out. Terror sets in. He lives there. It's too real. But at the same time, you don't have to know that. The only way to experience the terror of trauma is to say that trauma cannot happen. Jack's world is claustrophobic, but he doesn't know it, because it's the only world he's known in the five years of his life. For him, existence is idyllic, a composite entity composed only of him and his Ma. All the toys, books, and collages made from trash by his mother are living entities to Jack. Readers only see Room through her eyes: Emma Donoghue has created violent joy with the child's point of view. He is very advanced in some ways but extremely juvenile in others. His language is a curious mixture of portmanteau words, grammatical errors and long sentences captured on television. The author invites the reader to feel the claustrophobia of Jack's mother's atmosphere even as he delights in it himself. When it comes to the curious relationship between Jack and Ma, the Oedipal suggestions are very evident. Mom still breastfeeds Jack, even though he's five. His penis always “rises”Morning. This is the “mythical drama that plays out in every nursery,” as Joseph Campbell said: “The desire of the son to kill the father and marry the mother – and the father here deserves to be killed . » Room is a unique novel that offers insight into the most traumatic experiences a person can be exposed to in their lifetime, while also providing this insight from the perspective of a young child. HP Lovecraft's short story, The Outsider, offers a similar experience of trauma from an almost innocent perspective while coming from the tortured mind of one man. In Room, Jack has a curious look at Old Nick, almost wanting to touch him. He is quickly distracted from his action once Old Nick turns to him. We can see that Jack, with his naivety, is unable to see how Old Nick tortured his mother to the point that she hardly cares for her safety, but rather for Jack's. Jack, once he hears his mother shouting at her captor to stay away from her son, she returns to the safety of her wardrobe. “I open the doors, very slowly and silently. All I hear is the hum of the refrigerator. I get up, I take a step, two steps, three. I stub my toe on something owwwwwww. I pick it up and it's a shoe, a giant shoe. I look at Bed, there he is, Old Nick, his face is made of rock I think. I stuck my finger out, not to touch him, almost. His eyes shine white. I step back, I drop the shoe. I think he might scream but he smiles with big, shiny teeth and says, "Hey, son." I don't know what it is... So mom is louder than I've ever heard her, even doing Scream. “Get away, get away from him!” I go back to the Wardrobe, hit my head, arghhhhhh, she keeps screaming, “Get away from him.” “Shut up,” said old Nick, “shut up.” » He calls to her with words that I can't hear through the screams. Then his voice becomes blurred. “Stop that noise,” he said. Mom goes mmmmmmm instead of words. I hold my head where it hit, wrap it in both hands. In The Outsider, the unnamed narrator grieves for his lost innocence, not realizing that because of the minor experiences he has had, he is naive to the world around him. This nameless wanderer doesn't want to let go and is content to cling to the distant memories of the past where he feels safest. “Unhappy is he to whom childhood memories bring only fear and sadness. Miserable is he who watches solitary hours in vast, dreary rooms with brown hangings and maddening rows of ancient books, or watches in wonder in twilight groves of grotesque trees, gigantic and cluttered with vines that silently wave twisted branches far away. The gods have given so many things to me, the dazed, the disappointed one; the barren, the broken. And yet, I am strangely content and desperately cling to these dark memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to move beyond the other. The actions that both characters show are a desperate attraction to the areas that are most familiar to them. They are both careful about holding on to the past. Although these two characters are different ages, we can understand the acute sense of naivety that they both share. Another important gesture, observed in both characters, is their enormous curiosity. They are both eager to see what has been hidden from them for far too long. Jack's curiosity is first intrigued by a small scratching sound. The audience is quickly introduced to this new noise like the scratching of a mouse. Jack, rather than being afraid of something new, is friendly and wants to know more about the new.