In her novel Room, Emma Donoghue focuses on a mother and son living in an extreme set of circumstances. Prisoners of a mysterious kidnapper whom they refer to only as Old Nick, Ma and Jack—her five-year-old son, and a product of Old Nick’s multiple rapes—are confined to a one-room shed and cut off from the rest of the world. In the space they call Room, Ma and Jack watch television, read, have “Phys Ed” classes, and create a kind of language of their own in order to accommodate Jack’s limited understanding of the world. When they finally make their escape, Jack finds himself missing the solace of Room, and Ma struggles to protect her son and herself from the cruelty of the wide world. Through Room’s distinct sections—the half of the novel set inside of Room and the half set beyond it—Donoghue examines the effects of prolonged and profound separation from the world, ultimately suggesting that an end to physical seclusion does not always mean an end to emotional isolation.
At the beginning of the novel, Ma and Jack are confined to Room. Donoghue explores the effects of their isolation from the world, charting how their seclusion is shaping both of their lives. Ma and Jack live a simple, regimented life inside Room. Every object is important and, in Jack’s view, sentient. Ma and Jack’s daily rituals—mealtimes, Phys Ed, attempting to guess the code that will open the door to Room, measuring objects with a homemade ruler, and the planning of their weekly “Sundaytreat” requests for Old Nick—are peculiar and precise. Ma and Jack’s world has a logic of its own, and so does their language. Ma explains that the single Plant inside Room doesn’t have flowers anymore because “she got tired.” Ice cream, which Jack has never had, is “TV”—their word for things that are fake or nonexistent. Jack understands complicated words, like “poignant,” but has no idea what simple things such as hammocks are. The rules of life inside Room are strange and singular, and Donoghue quickly establishes the ways in which Ma has tried to teach Jack about what it is to be alive in the world—even if he believes the world is no bigger than Room. Propelled by a desire to escape Room before the increasingly unstable Old Nick does anything to harm her or Jack, Ma begins to educate Jack about the fact that there is a world beyond Room. With this new knowledge, Jack experiences isolation for the first time. In Room, with Ma, he never felt lonely or missed the world simply because he didn’t know there was a world to miss. Now, at the prospect of leaving Room and entering a world whose rules he does not understand, Jack experiences disorientation and trepidation—and his emotions foreshadow the uneasy transition he and Ma will have as they depart from the confines of Room.
Midway through the novel, Jack and Ma put an escape plan into motion—and in spite of a couple hiccups, they pull it off and are rescued. As they transition into the world beyond Room—Jack for the first time ever, and Ma for the first time in seven years—they find that though their physical isolation has come to an end, there is a long road ahead for both of them in terms of mitigating the emotional and social isolation that has become their norm. Ma and Jack’s intense, symbiotic emotional bond, their peculiar way of speaking to one another and explaining things, as well as Jack’s insistence on breastfeeding (and Ma’s encouragement of him to do so) all represent the ways in which the two of them have, within the constraints of Room, created a world of their own. When they move into the “real” world, Ma is overjoyed to be free and tries to teach Jack about new things like showers and pancakes—but Jack is upset over the fact that he and Ma now “have to be in the world.” Jack and Ma have been rescued from their secluded prison—but the problem is that Jack never saw Room as a prison at all, while Ma developed a series of physical, emotional, and intellectual survival mechanisms to make Room seem bearable or even normal. When a doctor suggests that Ma and Jack may be experiencing a kind of “separation anxiety,” Ma retorts that she and Jack are not separated from one another, and never will be—but the doctor points out that “it’s not just the two of [them] anymore.” As the doctor points out, the simple fact of Ma and Jack’s departure from Room is, in and of itself, a kind of separation anxiety. They have been separated from the world they jointly created—and, ironically, though their physical isolation has come to an end, their sense of emotional or psychological isolation is just beginning.
Though Ma and Jack do, by the end of the novel, become participants in the world around them by moving into an independent living community and engaging in more open relationships with Ma’s family, they remain deeply affected by all they’ve been through—and intimidated by the world around them. “Now I’m in the world all the time […] I’m always confused,” Jack says in the final pages of the book. Donoghue shows how the lingering effects of physical isolation contribute to ongoing emotional isolation—and how sometimes, the end of an intensely secluded lifestyle can be more isolating than solitude itself.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Isolation ThemeTracker
Isolation Quotes in Room
“Up in Heaven. Was I minus one, minus two, minus three— ?”
“Nah, the numbers didn’t start till you zoomed down.”
“Through Skylight. You were all sad till I happened in your tummy.”
“You said it.” Ma leans out of Bed to switch on Lamp, he makes everything light up whoosh. I shut my eyes just in time, then open one a crack, then both.
“I cried till I didn’t have any tears left,” she tells me. “I just lay here counting the seconds.”
Nothing makes Ma scared. Except Old Nick maybe. Mostly she calls him just him, I didn’t even know the name for him till I saw a cartoon about a guy that comes in the night called Old Nick. I call the real one that because he comes in the night, but he doesn’t look like the TV guy with a beard and horns and stuff.
“Listen. What we see on TV is... it’s pictures of real things.”
That’s the most astonishing I ever heard.
Ma’s got her hand over her mouth.
“Dora’s real for real?”
She takes her hand away. “No, sorry. Lots of TV is made-up pictures—like, Dora’s just a drawing—but the other people, the ones with faces that look like you and me, they’re real.”
“Actual humans?”
She nods. “And the places are real too, like farms and forests and airplanes and cities. . . ”
“Nah.” Why is she tricking me? “Where would they fit?”
“I don’t think you appreciate how good you’ve got it here,” says Old Nick. […] “Aboveground, natural light, central air, it’s a cut above some places, I can tell you. Fresh fruit, toiletries, what have you, click your fingers and it’s there. Plenty girls would thank their lucky stars for a setup like this, safe as houses. Specially with the kid—”
Is that me? […] I count my teeth, I keep getting it wrong, nineteen then twenty then nineteen again. I bite my tongue till it hurts.
“He put a blindfold on me—”
“Like Blindman’s Buff?”
“Yeah, but not fun. He drove and drove, I was terrified.”
“Where was I?”
“You hadn’t happened yet, remember?”
I forgot. “Was the dog in the truck too?”
“There was no dog.” Ma’s sounding cranky again. “You have to let me tell this story.”
“Can I pick another?”
“It’s what happened.”
“So, Jack, we mustn’t try and hurt him again. When he came back the next night, he said, number one, nothing would ever make him tell me the code. And number two, if I ever tried a stunt like that again, he’d go away and I’d get hungrier and hungrier till I died.”
She’s stopped I think.
My tummy creaks really loud and I figure it out, why Ma’s telling me the terrible story. She’s telling me that we’re going—
Then I’m blinking and covering my eyes, everything’s all dazzling because Lamp’s come back on.
“Don’t you want to escape?”
“Yeah. Only not really.”
[…]
Ma’s shaking her head. “It’s getting too small.”
“What is?”
“Room.”
“Room’s not small. Look.” I climb up on my chair and jump with my arms out and spin, I don’t bang into anything.
“You don’t even know what it’s doing to you.” Her voice is shaky. “You need to see things, touch things—”
“I do already.”
“More things, other things. You need more room.”
“What’ll the person do with it?”
“Read it, of course.”
“TV persons can read?”
She stares at me. “They’re real people, remember, just like us.”
I still don’t believe that but I don’t say.
Ma does the note on a bit of ruled paper. It’s a story all about us and Room and Please send help a.s.a.p., that means super fast. Near the start, there’s two words I never saw before, Ma says they’re her names like TV persons have, what everybody in Outside used to call her, it’s only me who says Ma.
“I’m too scared,” I shout. “I won’t do it not ever and I hate you.”
Ma’s breathing funny, she sits down on Floor. “That’s all right.”
How is it all right if I hate her?
Her hands are on her tummy. “I brought you into Room, I didn’t mean to but I did it and I’ve never once been sorry.”
I stare at her and she stares back.
“I brought you here, and tonight I’m going to get you out.”
Ma’s talking in my ear, she says we need to go talk to some more police. I snuggle against her, I say, “Want to go to Bed.”
“They’ll find us somewhere to sleep in a little while.”
“No. Bed.”
“You mean in Room?” Ma’s pulled back, she’s staring in my eyes.
“Yeah. I’ve seen the world and I’m tired now.”
“Oh, Jack,” she says, “we’re never going back.”
The car starts moving and I’m crying so much I can’t stop.
[Ma’s] walking with me up on her hip, I cling onto her shoulders. It’s dark but then there’s lights quick quick like fireworks.
“Vultures,” says Officer Oh.
Where?
“No pictures,” shouts the man police.
What pictures? I don’t see any vultures, I only see person faces with machines flashing and black fat sticks. They’re shouting but I can’t understand. Officer Oh tries to put the blanket over my head, I push it off.
“You keep talking about separation anxiety,” Ma’s saying to Dr. Clay, “but me and Jack are not going to be separated.”
“Still, it’s not just the two of you anymore, is it?”
“But that’s me, the Bonsai Boy.”
“The bouncy what?” [Ma] looks at the paper again and pushes her hair out of her face, she sort of groans.
“What’s bonsai?”
“A very tiny tree. People keep them in pots indoors and cut them every day so they stay all curled up.”
I’m thinking about Plant. We never cutted her, we let her grow all she liked but she died instead. “I’m not a tree. I’m a boy.”
“It’s just a figure of speech.” She squeezes the paper into the trash.
“He certainly seems to be taking giant steps toward recovery,” says the puffy-hair woman. “Now, you said just now it was ‘easier to control’ Jack when you were in captivity—”
“No, control things."
“You must feel an almost pathological need — understandably — to stand guard between your son and the world.”
“Yeah, it’s called being a mother.” Ma nearly snarls it.
“Is there a sense in which you miss being behind a locked door?”
Ma turns to Morris. “Is she allowed to ask me such stupid questions?”
“Can you come here and swing in the hammock?”
Pretty soon,” she says.
“When?”
“I don’t know, it depends. Is everything OK there with Grandma?”
“And Steppa.”
“Right. What’s new?”
“Everything,” I say.
That makes her laugh, I don’t know why.
“Did you play LEGO with your kids?”
“I don’t have any kids.”
“How come?”
Steppa shrugs. “Just never happened.”
I watch his hands, they’re lumpy but clever. “Is there a word for adults when they aren’t parents?”
“Tooth’s not just a thing, I have to have him.”
“Trust me, you don’t.”
“But—”
[Ma] holds on to my shoulders. “Bye-bye rotten old tooth. End of story.”
She’s nearly laughing but I’m not.
