Crater

I think the imagery of Room as a crater in the last line of the book is perfect. It the statement, it is very simple: Jack says, "It's like a crater, a hole where something happened." However, it is impossible to understand the full meaning of this word for Jack without reading this book. He learns the word "crater" from ma while putting chocolates on his cake in the first chapter.

“Look,” I show her, “there’s holes in my cake where the chocolates were till just now.”
“Like craters,” she says. She puts her fingertop in one.
“What’s craters?”
“Holes where something happened. Like a volcano or an explosion or something.”

Clearly, Ma's words stuck with Jack, as he echoes her definition in the last line of the novel.  In this case, the meaning of crater is simply the physical mark left in the absence of the chocolates.  This is also part of Jack's meaning in the last line, as many of the the items in Room are gone.  However, I think that he is thinking about much more than the missing items when he makes this powerful statement.

We can learn a little more about what Jack thinks about from how he uses it in this conversation with Ma.

“You know your heart, Jack?” “Bam bam.” I show her on my chest.
“No, but your feeling bit, where you’re sad or scared or laughing or stuff?”
That’s lower down, I think it’s in my tummy. “Well, he hasn’t got one.”
“A tummy?”
“A feeling bit,” says Ma.
I’m looking at my tummy. “What does he have instead?”
She shrugs. “Just a gap.”
Like a crater? But that’s a hole where something happened. What happened?

In this case the imagery of a crater is used to represent something more abstract: the lack of Old Nick's capacity for feeling.  Despite the fact that he instinctively associates the word "crater" with this idea, Jack doesn't seem to be totally sure that this is a proper use of the word.

By the end of the novel, Jack has a much better sense of how the world works, and is much more confident with his use of the word "crater."  I believe that in addition to the missing items in Room, he is referring to it as a mark left by the events of the past 7+ years, starting with Old Nick building Room, and ending with their eventual escape.  This really works well as simile, portraying Room as an empty shell where something significant happened, but is no longer relevant.  By comparing Room to a crater, Jack acknowledges that he and Ma have moved on for good, and there is nothing left for them in Room.

Room as a Hero's Journey

Room is very different from the other books we have read so far this semester, but since this is a hero's journey class, there must be some classic heroic journey aspect to the book. At the point we are at in the book, it does not really seem to fit the classic, campbellian hero's journey.  I think either Jack or Ma could be considered a hero, and will make a case for how each of these characters makes a journey.  

For Ma this journey is fairly clear, but her life before what we see in the book must be taken into account.  The "ordinary world" at the beginning of her is the normal world outside, with no Old Nick or Room.  Then, she is kidnapped and everything changes.  In a way, this kidnapping functions as a "call to adventure" in that it starts the heroic ordeal of living in Room.  Also, Ma's attempts to escape from Old Nick can be seen as a classic "refusal of the call."  There has been no shortage of heroic challenges so far in Ma's "journey," and we have yet to read how this journey concludes.

Jack undergoes a very different kind of hero's journey.  He is born into Room and it is all he knows, so the world view he has at the beginning of this novel can be seen as his starting point, or "ordinary world."  His heroic task is then to break free of this mindset and to break free of Room itself.   In Jack's case, I think the call to adventure comes from Ma starting the process of "unlying" and starting to make Jack understand just how small his world is.  When Ma first tries to explain this to Jack, he resists her explanation, refusing to acknowledge that there is more to the world than his mother and him.  However, at this point in the novel, he is on his way towards escaping his narrow worldview, and perhaps even Room.  

Perhaps these characters do not fit the paradigm of the hero's journey perfectly yet, but there is still a lot of development left in the novel.  Do you think that Room would be correctly called a hero's journey narrative? Which of these characters is closest to the idea of a campbellian hero?