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?
I totally agree with you about what Jack's journey is.
ReplyDeleteAs for Ma... being kidnapped and trying to run away is the "refusal of the call"? Refusal of the call to... being raped and confined to a 11x11 box and impregnated and had to give birth on the carpet and now has been raising a boy for 5 years all by herself IN that 11x11 room and now needs to protect him from her rapist? I can't really wrap my head around the "refusal of the call" you stated, but then again I can't think up anything to replace your theory with...
But I do feel like the journey is the mirror of Jacks -- that is, her journey is to explain to Jack about the real world and get him ready to go to the Outside. Evidently, he won't be perfectly ready (you can't really be perfectly ready to go to a whole new world), but Ma would need to convince Jack to leave the room, something he's known to be his whole universe throughout his entire life.
Ma's hero's journey is inherently harder to parse, since we learn about all the earlier stages after the fact, and get an incomplete picture. But the "refusal of the call" doesn't seem to function quite the same with her: the kidnapping clearly removes her from the ordinary world, and these extraordinary circumstances "call on" her to try and escape. But then the birth of Jack represents a different kind of "call," as she devotes herself to being a mother under extraordinary conditions--no room for "refusal" here. But not *every* element needs to be in place for a narrative to reflect the paradigm, and Ma's "call" is a good example of this.
DeleteLike Anthony said, it's hard to wrap my head around how Ma trying to escape Room is supposed to be a refusal of the call. It seems pretty much like Ma's and Jack's journeys are the same thing, simply with different starting points. I think that Ma's refusal of the call could be just waiting so long to tell Jack the truth; lying about his reality makes it easier for her to cope with Room until his fifth birthday, when she finally gives in and kickstarts his heroic journey. But once all that happens, Ma and Jack can largely be treated as one heroic unit getting out and getting used to the outside world (which is still going to be an ordeal for Ma simply because she's been locked away for so long).
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sarah. While Ma doesn't want to explain everything to Jack the real world, she eventually has to as Jack becomes more inquisitive. I think this is where we see Jack as a hero, as he bears Ma's promise to try to escape despite initially refusing.
DeleteThis book is pretty different from classic hero's journeys, but I do think that it has a very similar arc. The most obvious part of Campbell's hero's journey I think is Jack's entering the unknown. Outside is literally the unknown to Jack. Jack's homecoming hasn't really arrived (as of now at least), and I found it really interesting how Ma and Jack's stories are sort of the inverse of each other.
ReplyDeleteWell, at the time I wrote this post the had been no Great Escape, or even plans for one. It is now easy to see the hero's journey aspect from the chapter "Dying" onward, but this post explores what elements of the hero's journey can be seen in the first two chapters of a five chapter book.
DeleteI think the first half of the book has a clearer representation of Joe Campbell's monomyth, but when combined with the second half, things get a little more complicated. However, I would still consider both Ma and Jack heroes in their own way. They both face their own challenges and work to overcome them. It's interesting to find the differences in their respective journeys but they still follow the generic hero's journey in a way.
ReplyDeleteThe audience should experience the conflict that the hero should be feeling due to the main challenge. Hero's journey
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