Room by Emma Donoghue

1465 Words6 Pages
The novel “Room” by Emma Donoghue involves a young woman being abducted and abused both physically and emotionally by an anonymous man. The abductor misleads the nineteen year old student - later known as Ma - to believe that he was in desperate need of help with his “ill pet”. “The dog was just a trick to get me into his pickup truck, Old Nick’s truck” (Donoghue, 120). He keeps her locked in a garden shed behind his suburban house that he has converted into the self-contained “Room” of the novel’s title; which in fact acted as a very effective prison. The young woman is nineteen when she is kidnapped and within a couple of years becomes pregnant and bears a son, Jack. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has kept her for seven years. Through ingenuity and determination, Ma creates a life for herself and her son, but she knows it’s not enough for either of them. Jack’s curiosity is building alongside Ma’s desperation and Room can not contain either of them for much longer. With that being said, the main effects of Ma’s unfortunate abduction result in seven long years of being held captive, Ma’s trauma and phases of depression which lead her to suicidal attempts, and most importantly, both a stumbling block and advantage, the bearing of her only son, Jack. Jack thinks there are “thousands of things to do” in Room. We know that for his mother it is a very different story. Although the story never shifts to her point of view, we understand the significance of her moods in a way that the innocent child telling the story can not. We feel her desperation and her sense that time is running out. This gives the reader the opportunity to appreciate all the more the remarkable job she has done in making life bearable for Jack and her attempts to give him the skills he will need if they should ever be freed. “I used to dream about being
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