Topic > An Insight into The Trauma in Room and The Outsider

Room is a traumatic novel, about a young woman who aspires to keep her only child safe from the kidnapper who has imprisoned them both in a small shed for seven years. Donoghue's writing is capable of placing the reader within the terrifying experiences witnessed by such a young mind. As readers see through the eyes of a child who has a virgin understanding of the world around him, readers are quickly able to fill in the gaps with what is really happening. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Jack is Ma's son who has the understanding skills of a child. describing only what he sees and hears. The inanimate objects that occupy the room become characters for him, such as the sink, the table, the toothbrush and the bathtub. Jack sees Room's weekly supplies deliveries as Sunday treats rather than a necessity for survival and a somewhat normal life. In Room, Donoghue captures a child's perspective, as the terrors, observations, and oddities only a child can understand come to life in her work. When their captor Old Nick arrives, Jack hides in the closet and counts the creaking of the bed until Jack hears the sound of Old Nick's orgasm and stops. Donoghue skillfully allows his audience to make the leap between Jack's innocent observations and the harshness of reality in the Chamber. This limited perspective creates an important contradiction: for Ma, Room is a place of terror, but for Jack, it is the only home he knows, where all his imaginary friends live. And no matter how she tries to make him understand, he cannot understand the trauma he has suffered and how much he longs for the outside. For him, outside is just another word for space. Jack can only understand horror situations through the stories his mother shares with him. His mother is forced to remain sedentary in fictional worlds. Alice in Wonderland is used to represent how they are transported as slaves into a familiar world hoping to one day be freed from the madness, only to stumble into another dead end. While Dora the Explorer is used to give both of them the courage to free themselves from slavery. The battle is fought with a petrified mother racing against time, forced to explain what she herself has little knowledge of to her harmless son, to save herself from their intimidating referee. This novel is criticized by many because it is a purely traumatic experience, especially when both mother and son have only one chance to escape. Donoghue shows the true horror of these experiences, directly addressing the question of “what happens next,” rather than leaving it as an open question to be ignored. Donoghue's audience is thrown into the claustrophobia of Room, everything is terribly wrong, and readers are also torn between Jack's desire to stay where he feels safe and Ma's desire to escape and return home. The truth about "what happens next" is difficult for all characters involved to face. From the moment of their rescue, Ma and Jack are hounded by journalists, doctors and less than accommodating family members. In many ways, readers see how the room represented safety for Jack, while outside is where life is new and alien. Where Jack can't be with his mother 24/7, where people are strangers and Jack can bleed. Next, Donoghue introduces a welcome element of satire; since all Jack knows about the outside world is what he sees on TV, he can't relate to anything about the outside world unlessthat you don't imagine them as characters on an animal planet, or a fitness planet, a cartoon planet, etc. He is a stranger to the world. and is taking his first courageous steps towards becoming a more self-sufficient individual. Another target of Donoghue's subtle wit is the cult of motherhood. In literary forms one has not often seen a greater dependence on mother than that of the boy who lived in a single room with his mother, breast-fed well into his sixth year. Readers are shocked, however, even though the mother was unable to dissuade him, she is still determined. That is until a woman named Barbara Walters walks in and questions her live on national TV about breastfeeding. All in all, Donoghue leaves his audience with two opposing thoughts. On one side of the spectrum, Jack has slowly but surely adapted to the outside. Including all the stimuli that attack him from every direction, until he becomes an individual in his own right. Mom, on the other side. She is left with the uncomfortable idea that she will simply move from prison to prison for the rest of her life. Furthermore, readers may come to the conclusion that Ma may never have truly loved her son, Jack the way she still loved him. born daughter. In one telling sequence, he thoughtlessly recounts the old psychological experiment about monkeys separated from their mothers and fed only by a drainpipe, how they died due to the absence of love, not the absence of basic needs. Later, she too agrees with Jack's assessment that even the love of their human captors may have been enough to sustain those apes. This disturbing exchange is a metaphor. Jack takes the place of the human captor. They serve each other as love machines, but once released from captivity, Ma realizes how clinically she has approached caring for her son, ignoring the real emotional needs of herself or her son. To some extent, he feels he has used it. However, Mom would never have thought this without the accusatory questioning mentioned above. The room is described in Jack's voice, however, it is Joy's story. Jack's birth is what saves Joy again and again: “Before I came you watched TV all day and cried and cried. Then I shot through the skylight from the sky… you cut the cord and said, 'Hi, Jack.'” With that greeting, Joy was no longer alone. Hope is fragile, though, in someone raped and terrorized repeatedly with no way out. Terror enters inside. He lives there. It's all too real. But, at the same time, it doesn't have to be known. The only way to experience the terror of trauma is to say that trauma can't happen. Jack's world is claustrophobic, but he doesn't know it, because it's the only world he's known in the five years of his life. For him, existence is idyllic, a composite entity made up of just him and his mother. All the toys, books, and collages his mother made from garbage are living entities to Jack. Readers see Room only through her eyes: Emma Donoghue has created violent joy with the child's point of view. It's very advanced in some ways but extremely youthful in others. His language is a curious mix of combined words, grammatical errors and long sentences taken from TV. The author urges the reader to feel the claustrophobic atmosphere for Jack's mother even as he himself enjoys it. Coming to the curious relationship between Jack and Ma, the Oedipal suggestions are very evident. Mom still breastfeeds Jack, even though he is five years old. His penis always “stands up” in the morning. This is the “mythical drama enacted in every nursery,” as Joseph Campbell said: “The son's impulse to kill the father and marry the mother – and the father here deserves to be killed.” Room is a unique novelwhich offers insight into the most traumatic experiences a person may be exposed to over the course of their life, while also offering that insight from a child's perspective. HP Lovecraft's short story, The Outsider, provides a similar experience of trauma from an almost innocent view despite coming from the tortured mind of one man. In Room, Jack has a curious vision of Old Nick, almost wanting to touch him. He quickly gets distracted from his action once Old Nick addresses him. It can be seen that Jack with his naivety, is unable to see how old Nick tortured his mother to the point that she barely cares about her safety, but rather Jack's. Jack, once he hears his mother yelling at his captor to stay away from her son, runs to the safety of the cloakroom. “I open the doors, very slowly and silently. All I can hear is the hum of the refrigerator. I get up, take one step, two steps, three. I stub my foot on something owwwwwww. I pick it up and it's a shoe, a giant shoe. I look at Bed, there he is, Old Nick, his face is made of rock, I think. I pulled my finger out so as not to touch it, almost. His eyes flash all white. I jump back, drop my shoe. I think he might scream but he's smiling with big shiny teeth, saying, "Hey, son." I don't know what... So mom is louder than I've ever heard her even while singing Scream. "Go away, get away from him!" I run back to the Wardrobe, hit my head, arghhhhh, she keeps screaming, "Get away from him." “Shut up,” old Nick is saying, “shut up.” He calls her words that I can't hear through the screams. Then his voice becomes garbled. “Stop that noise,” he's saying. Mom says mmmmmm instead of words. I hold my head where it hit, wrap it in my two hands. In The Outsider, the unnamed narrator is in a state of mourning over his lost innocence, not realizing that due to the minor experiences he has encountered he is naive to the world around him. This nameless wanderer doesn't want to let go of things and is content to cling to distant memories of the past where he feels safest. “Unhappy is he to whom childhood memories bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who thinks back to lonely hours spent in vast, dreary rooms with brown curtains and maddening rows of ancient books, or to stunned vigils in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, tangled trees with vines silently waving twisted branches far overhead. The gods have given me so much, to me stunned, disappointed; the sterile, the destroyed. Yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those serious memories, when my mind threatens for a moment to go beyond, to the other.” The actions both characters display represent a desperate pull to the areas they are most familiar with. They are both careful about how to hold on to the past. Although both of these characters are different ages, you can understand the keen sense of naivety that they both share. Another important gesture, seen with both characters is their enormous curiosity. Both long to see what has been kept from them for too long. Jack's curiosity is initially piqued by a slight scratching noise. The audience is immediately introduced to this new noise, similar to the scratching of a mouse. Jack, instead of being afraid of something new, is friendly and wants to know more about the new creature. “I hear a sound so I get up without waking her. Next to the stove, a slight croaking sound. A living thing, an animal, not really TV. He's on the floor eating something, maybe a pancake crumb. It has a tail, I think what it is, what it is is a mouse. I get closer and when it is.