Jack as Utopian Social Critic

It’s a common trope of utopian literature to feature an outsider’s perspective to comment on our flawed civilization. The traveler from another planet, or some distant imaginary realm, or the future, will be led on a walking tour of earth’s poor houses, prisons, and mental institutions, and the outsider will comment repeatedly on how shocking, confusing, and unnecessary all these social ills truly are. “In our advanced civilization, you see, there is no sickness and no poverty. We’ve solved the problem of crime, and we have no jails. Why is it that people in your world go hungry, when there is more than enough food to go around?” The effect, of course, is to lead the reader to compare his or her familiar society with the radically unfamiliar (and, in many cases, depressingly implausible) idealized civilization the outsider represents.

Emma Donoghue uses Jack and his unique perspective to an analogous effect in Room (although I am emphatically not suggesting that she posits Ma and Jack’s experience in Room as some kind of Utopia). One of Jack’s earliest interactions with a medical professional, soon after his and Ma’s escape/rescue, entails the doctor telling Jack he’s “some kind of hero” and asking him, “How’re you liking the world so far?” (177). Jack is bewildered, of course, and remains silent on “the world so far.” He can only nod once the doctor loads the dice and prompts him with, “Pretty nice?” At this early point, not much is “nice” about being in the world for Jack. He does end up finding much about the world to be “pretty nice”—bacon, ice cream, Legos—but he also finds the world bewilderingly complex and often ambivalent. For Jack, we all exist in an increasingly vast realm he calls Outside, but from our perspective, he’s the outsider, and Donoghue uses Jack’s sharp, intelligent, perceptive narration repeatedly to shine a critical light on aspects of our world we take for granted, much like the Utopian novelist.

Noreen describes Jack as “like a visitor from another planet” (225), and while he corrects her (“We’re not visitors, Ma says we have to stay forever till we’re dead”), his observations about early twenty-first century American society often serve a kind of social-critical function, akin to the visitor from another planet in Utopian fiction. Jack returns repeatedly to the idea that he and Ma are not fundamentally the same as these other people he’s seeing everywhere, and he has trouble getting his head around the fact that Ma once was one of them. He accepts Dr. Clay’s insistence that he’s “one of us,” part of “humankind,” but Jack privately wonders, “maybe I’m a human but I’m a me-and-Ma as well. I don’t know a word for us two. Roomers?” (274). But Jack is really the only true “Roomer,” as Ma is not forming her impressions of our planet for the first time, the way Jack is. When he makes offhanded comments like, “Outsiders are not like us, they’ve got a million of things and different kinds of each thing, like all different chocolate bars and machines and shoes. Their things are all for different doing, like nailbrush and toothbrush and sweeping brush and toilet brush and clothes brush and yard brush and hairbrush” (264), this serves both as a representation of his genuine disorientation at the endless variety of things that occupy space in our world and an implicit comment on all the stuff we surround ourselves with. In contrast, Ma and Jack’s starkly reduced way of life in Room might seem ideally simplified.

Plenty of Jack’s observations, wherein he defamiliarizes our world in a way that allows us to see it fresh, are simply funny—like when he alludes to the book about “mutant turtles who say no to drugs” (224). Or he points out totally familiar habits of speech, often involving the weird ways adults relate to children, because he hasn’t heard these things thousands of times, as other kids have (like when he bangs his head on the faucet in the bath and Grandma says “Careful”: “Why do persons only say that after the hurt?” [283]—good question, Jack!). At times he offers a kind of social-critical commentary, but it seems like he must be repeating an explanation Grandma or Steppa or Ma has given him, as when he describes the lottery: “The little cards with numbers all over are called a lottery, idiots buy them hoping to get magicked into millionaires” (285). This passage begins as Jack making his own observations about the sheer amount of trash our profligate civilization generates—“There’s lots of every kind of thing in the world but it all costs money, even stuff to throw away, like the man in the line ahead of us in the convenience store buys a something in a box and rips the box and puts it in the trash right away”—but “idiots” is not a word Jack typically uses, and when he describes the lottery, we imagine him parroting something Grandma must have said (as kids will do).

But some of his comments veer closer to social commentary, especially when he’s making observations about parenting. Again, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything ideal about Jack and Ma’s arrangement (like the book-club member who compares their imprisonment to her “peaceful” week spent at a monastery in Scotland, easily one of the dumbest comments made in this book [280]). But compared to Bronwyn and her parents—who I’m sure are fine people, and Bronwyn is going to grow up to be a fine, if somewhat entitled and overindulged, young woman—Jack and Ma seem to be doing pretty well. Jack is struggling to adjust to Outside, naturally, but his disorientation at the mall has everything to do with the fact that he has never been to a mall before, has never even heard of one, and doesn’t even know how stores work. If Jack behaves “badly” in the scene where Paul and Deana take him to the mall, it’s because he has no idea what’s going on. Bronwyn’s behavior, we surmise, is par for the course. She is accustomed to throwing a tantrum when she doesn’t get her way, and her parents are all too ready to indulge her. Paul and Deana’s take on parenting is very familiar to me as a contemporary American parent—and far be it from any of us to judge a fellow parent’s efforts too harshly. But dismissing a drum as a gift for a child as a “concussion hazard” seems like an especially ludicrous example of the modern-day obsession with helmets and safety seats and protecting children from every possible risk that might befall them. I’m not saying Bronwyn is turning into a little monster (though you’re certainly free to draw that conclusion yourself), but it’s clearly not a case of Paul and Deana’s parenting looking obviously so much better than Ma’s.

Some of Jack’s observations sound almost too pat, too perceptive and pointed and critically astute for even an exceptionally verbal five-year-old. “In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. [Uni students: Holla!] Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don’t have jobs, so I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything” (286). Paul and Deana, of course, are balancing child-rearing with jobs (so Bronwyn gets to go to a high-end daycare facility to study sign language and hip-hop!), and this maybe has something to do with their Starbucks-fueled state of perpetual anxiety at the mall. But this passage also calls to mind the Utopian-fiction dynamic I described above: “You earthlings seem to always be in a hurry, but you never truly allow yourselves to be at the place you are.” Jack seems right, of course, and the reader is intended to glimpse something about the way we all live these days—to see contemporary culture mirrored back to us through the eyes of an innocent.

In the next paragraph, Jack nails a scenario that I certainly recognize as a parent: “Also everywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear” (287). We might update this playground scenario a year or two and describe the parents filming the kids’ reenactment of the “cute” thing, and then ignoring the kid while posting the footage to Facebook on their phone. I find this passage extremely sad—which is saying something in such a sad novel. It’s the impression that the parents “mostly don’t seem to like” their kids, even as they photograph them and share their “accomplishments.” Jack’s mother has no photos of his early years, but she doesn’t see this as “terrible” the way her mother does: “I don’t forget a day of it” (299). But Jack has no doubt in his mind that Ma “likes” him (in addition to loving him—not necessarily the same thing). It’s partly a result of their perverse living arrangements that creates this closeness, and again, Donoghue is not endorsing the situation that led to this special closeness. But as with the Utopian outsider commenting on the ways of our world, we might feel indicted in this visitor from another planet’s description of what we look like when we’re supposed to be playing with our kids.