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.
In a less scientific way--similar maybe to Donoghue's own observations after spending time around her son--I can attest that Jack's narrative voice *feels* very familiar as a depiction of a fiver-year-old and what it's like to hang out with one as an adult. This is a more extreme case, of course, with its own variables, but Jack's constant questions leading to more questions, how he is compelled to repeatedly put things in their proper relational places in his sentences, how he has endless appetites to hear the same stories repeated over and over, and his wide-eyed enthusiasm, which is connected to his short attention span, all *feels* right as an adult author's attempt to shape a very young narrative voice.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the other corner, there's Vardaman, who displays some of the same qualities but is a much less coherent storyteller. Whereas Ma is constantly helping Jack fill in the blanks and reorder his knowledge, we see Vardaman as struggling mostly on his own (or with Darl, who confuses him even further with his "was not / is" stuff!).