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.