Jack's Return Home

The final step in Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Monomyth is the return home from the unknown, and Donoghue seems to take this very literally. After overcoming the main obstacle in the book, taking down Old Nick in the Great Escape, Jack immediately wants to go back to Room, the home he has known his whole life. At that point, Ma wants to get as far away as possible, so Jack waits until she is ready before asking to see it again. She grudgingly calls Officer Oh and arranges for them to go, which surprised me, as I was afraid that Jack would see this as a return home. However, his reaction was almost the opposite of this, and I think it aptly brought the story to a close.

We see the first sign of Jack’s disillusionment as they arrive at Room. He doesn’t recognize Old Nick’s house, and when he sees the shed, he doesn’t believe such a small place could really have been all he knew for the first five years of his life. “We step in through Door and it’s all wrong. Smaller than Room and emptier and it smells weird […]. ‘I don’t think this is it, I whisper to Ma.’” Having been exposed to the vastness of the world, he can’t recognize the old Jack that wanted to come back to Room after escaping. Even in such a short time outside, he has already outgrown the marks that were used to measure this old Jack on his birthdays, and he forgets simple things about his life there, such as where plant was. Somehow, it feels as though his life in Room was oddly separate from his life in Outside, and that he is looking back upon his old life with the eyes of a different person. Finally, he realizes that this is not where he belongs, and decides to say goodnight (or rather, as Ma suggests, goodbye) to Room, thus concluding his transition into the real world.

I found this to be a very satisfying ending, and although it might be more of a coming-of-age than a heroic return, I think it actually follows Campbell’s paradigm quite nicely. The reason for this is that Jack’s challenge in the book is not just to escape, but also to adjust to the real world. Indeed, the fact that his escape comes in the middle of the book, and that there are two sections after it indicates that the hardest part for Jack is to come to grips with the colossal nature and diversity of Outside, the place that will become his home. In this view, Donoghue’s ending brings us closure, in that Jack says his goodbyes and parts ways with Room, ready to go to his real home in the outside world. 

How can we relate to Jack?

            Although Room is told from Jack’s point of view, I often found it difficult to empathize with him. Logically, I knew that Room is his whole universe—he hasn’t experienced anything else, and therefore isn’t particularly interested in Outside, at least at first. For the reader, however, Ma’s stories about how Old Nick “stole” her and her experiences before Jack is born are far more compelling, as they provide the missing information that drives the plot of the book. As a result, when he asked Ma completely impertinent questions and just didn’t seem to care while she’s describing what it’s like to be outside, it almost made me want to strangle him.

            To be honest, though, I don’t think I would have acted differently if I were in Jack’s situation, even as a sixteen-year-old. If someone told me, for example, that all the proper nouns in the universe (e.g. Earth, America, The Eiffel Tower, etc.) were not singular objects, but rather just one of many ordinary things, I would first think they were crazy, and then probably ignore them and get on with my life. Like Jack, I wouldn’t understand what I would be missing out on, and I would be perfectly happy with my restricted, perfectly controlled life.

            This realization, that I may not be that different from Jack than I originally thought, led me to think harder about any other similarities there might be between us, and I noticed that in terms of the mundane aspects of life, we are not that different. One scene that comes to mind, for example, is when Ma doesn’t want Jack to eat his lollipop. She tells him that “it’s garbage” and “it cost him maybe fifty cents,” but for Jack, and for me when I was younger, this would not have been a good enough reason. I can therefore totally sympathize with him when he sneaks out of Bed to eat it at night, and I can imagine myself doing a similar thing when I was five. Another scene that felt very familiar to me was when Jack woke up to find Ma out of bed and hitting the floor. His feeling of helplessness and inability to understand her frustration reminds me of how I used to feel when my parents argued, and although I can’t compare my situation to his, I’m sure the feeling was very similar. Unlike Ma, who knows and misses what she has been deprived of, Jack is just like me or any other kid who doesn’t understand the real world, and thinking of him in this way makes him a much more sympathetic character.

The Revolution Reflected in Marji

            The stark contrast between the events of the Iranian revolution as westerners heard about them on the news and the personal touch that comes from seeing them through a child’s eyes is one of the things that makes Persepolis such a successful graphic novel. It places us in the middle of the revolution as it unfolds, and this makes it a much more relatable story. What I found most powerful about the book, however, was not the description of the repressive regime or of family and close friends being tortured, but rather the impact the revolution had on Marji.

            To see this, we first have to consider what her life was like before the revolution became violent. Despite the western image of Iran as a desolate, backward country, Marji goes to “a French non-religious school where boys and girls were together.” When wearing the veil becomes obligatory for girls at school, she reacts just like many western children would, not understanding why this is being forced on her and playing with it during break times. Her family is similarly westernized, her father driving a Cadillac, for example. For me specifically, there was one scene that made her seem much more like me as a ten-year-old than a victim of a political revolution. When her parents come home from demonstrating in the streets, she asks them to play Monopoly, but they say “it’s not the right time.” Her response, that “it’s never the right time,” is so familiar and adolescent that I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for her, almost as a friend. All of this serves to make Marji a sympathetic character who we can easily understand.

            Soon, however, we see the violence and pervasiveness of the revolution reflected in Marji, as she behaves surprisingly radically for a ten-year-old. When she finds out that Ramin’s father was in the Savak, for example, she decides to “put nails between [her] fingers like American brass knuckles and to attack Ramin.” Given how common violence was at the time, she doesn’t see this as anything special, and her mother has to stop her from committing such a terrible crime. Later, when she hears stories of her parents’ friends’ experiences in prison, a similar thing happens. She decides that to be a hero, one has to be tortured, and suggests playing a game with her friends in which they torture the loser. She simply doesn’t understand that this is wrong; she has been so corrupted by the events around her, that she is completely desensitized to violence, and has mostly lost her sense of morality, ethics, and justice. To me, this really drove home the harshness of life during the Iranian revolution, given that at first I saw myself in her, and all the radical viewpoints she has could just as easily have been mine.

Is Grant or Jefferson the hero?

            The concept of a hero as we have defined it in class is very different from the way Grant describes it to Jefferson. In Campbell’s monomyth, the hero rises above almost insurmountable odds to overcome obstacles alone. Although they might have sidekicks or supernatural aid along the way, they are the main protagonist, and the other characters are just there to provide substance to the story. Grant’s view, on the other hand, is much more communal. Jefferson could be a hero because he “could give something to [Miss Emma], to [Grant], to those children in the quarter. He could give them something that [Grant] never could.”

            The scene in chapter twelve where the three men at the Rainbow Club are talking about Jackie Robinson exemplifies this view of heroism quite well. The men remember every statistic and every important event in his life not just because they are fans, but because they are proud of him. Indeed, after someone acts out Jackie stealing home plate, Gaines describes one of the old men as “nodding his head emphatically, with great pride.” We get this same feeling of pride in the African-American community with Joe Louis. When he loses his fight against Schmeling, they ask themselves “what else in the world was there to be proud of, if Joe had lost?” When he wins the second match, however, they “held their heads higher than any people on Earth had ever done for any reason.” Clearly, although Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis didn’t do anything in particular to improve the lives of the people in the quarter, they were heroes because the African-American community took pride in them and rallied around them. They gave them hope that they could stand up to the racist system at the time and succeed, and I think it is this hope and sense of pride that Grant is referring to.

            Although more common, heroism in this sense of the word is not something that is easy to achieve, and we see Grant try and fail many times to be a hero. In the Rainbow Club, for example, he gives in to the pressures of racism, and can’t keep himself from punching the two bricklayers who are insulting Jefferson. By contrast, Jefferson has a unique way of uniting the community, and we see this when the kids pool their money to buy a present for him at Christmas. Even though he can’t avoid the fact that he will be executed, whereas Grant takes action against the bricklayers spouting racist insults, Jefferson is the one who is the hero, while Grant merely looks like a kid without any self-control.

Addie's Coffin as a Talisman

            Although As I Lay Dying doesn’t seem to have one specific hero, it does fit many aspects of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. One such aspect that appears in the book is the talisman, a special object that pops up throughout the story and helps the hero on their quest (e.g. the ring in The Hobbit). In As I Lay Dying, it takes the form of Addie’s coffin, the object around which the story revolves. Unlike the talismans in other hero narratives, however, the coffin never helps anyone in the Bundren family; rather, it is the cause of a lot of the drama in the book, and is a constant reminder of the purpose of their journey.

            The coffin comes into play at the very beginning of the book, and already the “Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.” of Cash’s adze cutting the wood seems to follow Darl home. He mentions that Cash is a good carpenter, and indeed we soon see that building a high quality coffin “on the bevel” is the only thing on Cash’s mind. In fact, Cash’s devotion and determination to finish it foreshadows the Bundrens’ journey to Jefferson quite strongly, since just as the Bundren family will not rest until they get to Jefferson and bury the coffin, Cash seems to be unable to stop until he finishes, working through the night in the pouring rain.

            Once Addie’s coffin is finally built, the Bundrens’ odyssey begins, and they take it with them to Jefferson. Along the way, though, complications with crossing the river and Darl setting the Gillespie barn on fire lead them to lose the coffin multiple times, and each time we see someone in the Bundren family take a major risk to retrieve it. When the barn catches fire, for example, Jewel runs in to save the animals, which is understandable, but then risks his life again to save the coffin and ends up burning his back. In hindsight, it seems like this was a completely unnecessary risk – although the purpose of their entire trip was to bury the coffin, it wasn’t worth Jewel’s life to save it.

            Finally, by the time they reach Jefferson, the homemade, foul-smelling coffin is almost part of the family, and it symbolizes the way people in the city see them. People make fun of them, and it’s clear that they don’t belong. Similarly, when people smell the coffin and Addie’s rotting body inside, they want the Bundrens to remove it from the city. Although this is a reasonable request – the coffin gives off a horrible stench for hundreds of yards – they become extremely defensive, and Jewel is ready to punch the person who asked.

            Clearly, over the course of their journey, the Bundrens become very attached to the coffin, risking their lives for it and defending it. If we take the Bundren family to be the heroes of the story, then the coffin fulfills many of the properties of Campbell’s idea of a talisman.