Room

Content Warning: This section contains depictions of abuse through neglect and imprisonment.

Five-year-old Jack has never been exposed to anything outside of Room besides the few books inside Room and the television. The influence of this limited exposure to literature and media is apparent through Jack’s narration, as he regularly references the books he knows as they come in and out of relevance during his ongoing monologue. The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd is featured prominently in Jack’s narration as well as his interactions with Ma. The Runaway Bunny’s function in Room is to illustrate the way Jack perceives mother and child relationships. Jack likes the book, but it is not his favorite. However, he knows it’s Ma’s favorite so he asks her to read it when he can tell she is not feeling happy. Ma relates to the mother bunny in the story, as her bond with Jack is so significant that she would chase him to the ends of the earth if he tried to run away from her. Later, after Jack and Ma are separated, Jack does not enjoy hearing Grandma read The Runaway Bunny because he is in the opposite situation: His mother is far away from him, and he does not know how to chase her down. Like the baby bunny in the story, Jack rebels against Ma, but it never damages their relationship because the love between them is so strong.

Alice in Wonderland also plays a significant role in illustrating both Jack and Ma’s perspectives about their situation. In Alice in Wonderland (also known as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll), Alice is swept away to a different world, leaving behind what she knows. When Ma tells Jack about her life before Room, she uses Alice as an example to illustrate how she used to be somewhere else. This analogy helps Jack understand what Ma means, since he is never known the world outside of Room. Because of Jack’s confined upbringing inside Room, however, his perspective differs from Ma’s, especially once they have escaped Room. While Ma is the version of Alice who has escaped Wonderland and is changed from her experiences, Jack is the version of Alice who is thrust into an entirely unfamiliar setting where seemingly absurd things are normal to everyone else. Like Alice encountering the many silly and absurd things in Wonderland—croquet with flamingos, tea with rabbits—Jack sees reality as silly and absurd because it is so far removed from anything he has experienced. Mundane things, like the silverware in the dining hall not having plastic handles and the plates being blue, throw Jack off because they are like nothing he has seen before. He wonders, “How can they let the food go on the blue plates and get all color on?” (178), because the thought of a blue plate is absurd to him.

Finally, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is mentioned in Chapter 5 as Jack observes intellectuals discussing the philosophical implications of Jack’s confined upbringing. They compare Jack to the people in Plato’s cave, watching the shadows on the wall but not ever fully understanding what they are seeing. For Jack, the shadows are the things he sees on television, informing his view of the real world without fully exposing him to reality. Jack’s interpretation of the world as he learns more about it and reconciles it with what he has seen on television is a key part of Jack’s character development as the novel progresses.