A Child's Voice

I know that a lot of blog posts have already been written about Jack and his narrative style, but I thought that I'd join the throng with a slightly different focus. Child narrators have become increasingly popular in the 21st century, both in "young adult" fiction featuring teen protagonists and more mature works like Room. In my opinion, most of these novels completely fail to depict a child's mind with any accuracy. The child narrators are either turned into annoyingly precocious "small adults" with limited vocabularies or imbeciles that have to be told not to eat their pets. It's easy to see why this sort of thing occurs. Most authors are adults, and as such they have forgotten how to think and act like a child. However, the dearth of good child narrators is often frustrating for me as a reader, and so it's especially satisfying to see a novel like Room execute the idea properly.

So, how does Room succeed where so many other novels fail? According to Emma Donoghue, she learned partially by watching her own five-year-old son Finn and thinking about how different Jack would be from him. However, we can also examine a firm psychological grounding for Jack's worldview in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. (Psychology disclaimer: as with the ideas of Freud I used a few posts ago, Piaget's theory is overly simplistic and frequently criticized or modified. However, I think it's good enough for this sort of superficial analysis. Feel free to comment with suggestions on how to make the model more accurate if you feel I'm missing something important.)

According to Piaget, five-year-olds are in the "preoperational" stage of cognitive development. This means that they are able to mentally represent the world around them through images and words, but unable to think in a precise and concrete manner. Properties such as the conservation of substances are not yet clear to preoperational children, and egocentricism is common. A preoperational child often becomes intensely curious about the world, and builds up a massive store of knowledge as a result, but is still uncertain about how to organize and use the knowledge. In short, the thought processes of a child Jack's age are intermediate between the barrage of emotion experienced by a baby and the logical reasoning characteristic of adults or teenagers.

Does Jack's narration reflect these sorts of thought processes? I think so. Jack has absorbed much information about Outside from TV and Ma's answers to his incessant questions. However, he has difficulty piecing everything together into a coherent worldview, and particularly struggles to understand other people's viewpoints. These difficulties are entirely reasonable, given that Jack has no interaction with humans other than Ma, which makes it hard to empathize with the people he doesn't even see as real at first, but it also reflects the stage of his cognitive development. He also has a tendancy to focus on one aspect of an object to the exclusion of all else, which is a hallmark of the preoperational stage. For example, he has a powerful association between vomit, a bad smell, and death due to his experiences in the Great Escape. When he sees vomit a couple of times later in the book, he only associates it with death and the smell, rather than noticing the color or anything else about it. The mental connections he forms are strong, so strong that he sees a few traits of most objects to the exclusion of all else. This is a big part of what makes his narration so realistically child-like: he constantly references his earlier thoughts, linking things together very differently from any adult, and I think that's key to what makes this novel so compelling.

A Comparison of Heroes

At this point in the semester, I feel that we have read enough novels following the hero's journey described by Joseph Campbell that we may begin to divide them into sub-categories. Two such categories present themselves to me, with two of the books we've covered thus far in each. One, the "epic" hero's journey, describes The Odyssey and A Lesson Before Dying, and the other, the "personal" hero's journey, can be seen in the plots of As I Lay Dying and Room. Comparing and contrasting these two sub-categories, I believe, will help us better understand both genres as they relate to the overarching paradigm described by The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Let's start with the epic hero's journey. These stories are told from an outsider's perspective, and as a result individual introspection is downplayed in favor of public actions and deeds. The outcome is known from the start, as an epic hero's journey is meant to be told and retold through generations. This narrative arc is most obvious in The Odyssey: the epic was literally sung by bards for hundreds of years, and the first two or three stanzas explain the majority of the plot, taking away all suspense for the audience. Although A Lesson Before Dying doesn't fit this mold quite so cleanly, the hero (Jefferson in my opinion, although some may disagree) only narrates one chapter of the novel, and his execution is set from the very first chapter. Jefferson denies his humanity until the end of the book, and the focus is more on his external reactions to Grant's lessons than his private internal monologue.

The personal hero's journey is very different, In these stories, the hero is also the narrator, and the journey is more about their thoughts than their actions. The outcome is less well known, as most if not all heroism takes place in the hero's mind without leaving any sort of legacy behind. As I Lay Dying is a perfect example of this, as the Bundrens are only remembered as "queer" or worse by the various townsfolk they encounter, and as a result developments such as Darl's burning of the barn are not broadcasted to the audience at the beginning (there's no framework of other people retelling the story). As I Lay Dying also focuses on how each member of the family copes with their grief over Addie's death rather than the details of her burial, emphasizing the internal aspects of their journey. Room, like A Lesson Before Dying, is less clear-cut, but the most important parts of Jack's journey are more mental than physical. Although he appears to exhibit some classic heroism in his execution of Plan B, he has far more difficulty communicating with Officer Oh than getting out of Rug. Furthermore, his physical heroism occurs less than halfway through Room, and the emerging struggle in the chapter "After" is a purely mental one. Jack has never been outside Room before, and learning to cope with the fastness of the world is a huge obstacle to his personal growth. I expect that his Supreme Ordeal has yet to come, and when it finally arrives it will revolve around his psychological development rather than anything more external.

I'm curious to hear what all of you think about this hypothesis. Should A Lesson Before Dying be considered an epic hero's journey, or a personal one? How about Room? Do the sub-categories need to reworked, or should they be considered as a spectrum instead? Where do the other hero's journeys you enjoy fit in to this model?

Jefferson's Philosophical Progression

In A Lesson Before Dying, we've talked a lot about what it even means for Jefferson to become a man. Some of the characters are taking bets on whether or not Grant will succeed in his teaching, but his goal is a very abstract and subtle one to grasp. As I read, it seems like Jefferson is slowly progressing through various philosophical systems until he finally approaches one in which his actions can have the wide-ranging effects that Grant, Tante Lou, and Miss Emma hope for from him.

During Grant's first few visits to the cell, Jefferson is practically in a state of shock. He barely speaks, and when he does talk it's only to say that "it don't matter" and that he's "nothing but an old hog." He is described several times as displaying a wide, painful grin in order to hide his feelings from any and all visitors. In short, he appears to be existing in anomie, a state where an individual is not provided with moral guidance from society due to a lack of connections with their community. Jefferson is cut off from the rest of the world as he attempts to come to terms with his own impending death, and in response he simply shuts down and rebels against anything and everything he can. He tries to hurt his visitors with his cynicism and recalcitrance, and frequently refuses to eat or speak because he sees everything as meaningless.

Once his execution date is actually set, Jefferson's attitude changes. He is still unready to grapple with what it means to die, so he begins to seek distractions by indulging in hedonism (or what passes for hedonism in a jail cell). Jefferson asks for his last meal to be an entire gallon of ice cream and spends entire days listening to the radio Grant gets for him, ignoring Miss Emma when she tries to talk to him. At this point, he's still attempting to deny his inevitable death, but his awareness of the outside world is beginning to grow.

A couple of weeks later, Jefferson is able to really listen to and comprehend Grant's speeches about heroism and the broader impact of his own actions. He understands that his actions will have no impact on his own fate, but realizes that he can still "break the cycle" and become a hero in his community. Although he still acts in some slightly un-heroic ways (asking what anybody has ever done for him, for example), Jefferson seems to be actively grappling with his own death and potential legacy, searching for the strength to confront his execution with the dignity that everyone is requesting from him. However, he still doesn't seem to have the answers he's looking for, and I expect that this final stage of development will be the subject of the last three chapters of the novel.