Analysis Of Room By Emma Donoghue

Identity can be defined as the fact of being whom or what a person is. Internal and external factors shape a child’s concept of their own identity. These factors include the environmental setting, family, community, and the media. In the novel Room by Emma Donoghue, the 5-year-old narrator/protagonist Jack learns his identity through exploring the familiar space he occupies, the close relationship between he and his mother, and watching television. It is clear that Jack faces many challenges, which lead him to discover how his identity is shaped; this is evident through the exploration of him forming personal attachments to his mother, the room he lived in, and the problems he encounters to the new outside

In this section, Jeannette Walls starts off, in the present time by telling the readers about her seeing her mom on the street, that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Jeannette uses emotional words like blustering and fretted to show that seeing her mom was an emotional time. Later in the section, she goes way back into her life to when she was three years old and when her family and her was living in the desert. She started off telling a story of when she was on fire. This story was intense, it was really dramatic on her parents part, her dad was screaming at her and the doctor a lot. Then she talked about when they moved to Las Vegas, her family lived in a motel room, which didn’t last long, they had to leave Vegas in a rush, because her dad was cheating in blackjack and the dealer found out. The last story in the section is where her family drove to San Francisco and stayed in another motel. One night her dad was at the bar, across the street. He left Jeannette and her three other siblings in the room. Jeannette got bored so she decided to play with fire and that let to a big disaster resulting in the whole hotel burning down.

“He [Jeannette’s father, Rex] will not keep me out of harm’s way, he will put me in harm’s way and I have to find a way to remove myself from the situation.” (Diversity Connection). I feel like this quote, from Jeannette, came t directly from the situation where Rex took her out to the bar to help him earn money for alcohol, but yet she still doesn’t see herself as a victim. Even though Jeannette Walls was the victim of sexual abuse at a very young age, she tries to recreate the freedom from her childhood into her adult life, But in her younger years where she has no occupational activities, no nurturing, no money and no friends to turn to, it proves to be very hard to maintain.

This clearly shows that mainly all our bad experiences are pushed into the unconscious mind causing it to come back many years later this could be through; post-traumatic stress disorder, this means that all your terrors and fears come back through either night terrors or flashbacks. Psychoanalysis deals with early negative emotions this could be by discovering triggers and talking openly about these bad experiences.

able to get rid of. At the end of the poem Sexton admits the thoughts of suicide are something you can never get rid of, “and yet she waits for me, year after year” (line 25). Sexton justifies the reasons for her suicide by saying that her thoughts and bad memories will never stop coming back because this has been happening for years and years now there is no going back for Sexton. She leaves us with the last stanza filled with unfinished things. This could be a metaphor for her life that is unfinished because of her death occurrence.

When Jeannette suffers from awful burns that cover huge swaths of her body, instead of being afraid of fire, she becomes obsessed with it. Constantly lighting matches when she shouldn’t, and, furthermore, participating in the activity that cause her to get burned in the first place. She recalls how, “A few days after Mom and Dad brought me home, I cooked myself some hot dogs.” showing her resilience and mental hardiness (Walls 15). Logically, she knows the the incident with the fire isn't a common occurance, so she chose not to be afraid of it. Seemingly, her only hang ups about the incident are the scars she received but even so, they are a relatively slight blow against her self esteem. Another instance highlighting the theme of mental resilience occurs in Welch, when Erma sexually abuses Brian, and they all resolutely decide to ignore the likelihood that their father experienced the same thing, “‘Don’t think about things like that,’ Lori told me… And so I put it out of my mind.” (Walls 148) Not the healthiest way of dealing with something like that, but it shows that their capacity for dissociating and emotional pain tolerance is frighteningly high. Under normal circumstances, sexual abuse is not an easy thing overcome. In each incident of mind over matter, although both aren’t necessarily positives instances of it, the Walls show

A traumatic event occurs when a person is in a situation where there is a risk of harm or danger to themselves or other people. Situations like this are usually frightening or cause a lot of stress. In such situations, people feel helpless. We all cope with these traumas in different ways, in the protagonist’s case, he writes about it. Tim O’Brien expresses a candid tone in the passage corresponding to Lavender’s death from fictional novel, The Things They Carried using specific rhetorical strategies in order to create a relatable dilemma with how often times horrific stories are unintentionally skewed.

Melissa Harris-Perry uses some important figurative language to describe the African American women struggle of trying to stand up in a crooked room. By using this, the author is stating that black women are trying to follow the rules and regulations of society, uphold the law, and still be true to themselves. Despite this, society will always try and target, tear down, and oppress black women Black women, resilient as they are, continue to try but still are attacked by the unfair institutions against them. Furthermore, the metaphor is stating that African-American women are not at fault for the stereotypes and oppression that are placed on them.

Re-experiencing an event occurs in different ways. First, a person may have disturbing recollections of the traumatic event consciously while awake or unconsciously in a dream state. Other events may occur to trigger symptoms and the affected person may dissociate while reliving the traumatic moment or moments. The layman’s term, “flashback”, defines the common re-experiencing event where a person feels as though he or she is reliving the trauma (Kulkarni et al., 2011; Norman, 2000; Owens, Baker, Kasckow, Ciesla & Mohamed, 2005).

In Martha Stout’s essay “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday”, she discusses how a person who has suffered a traumatic experience is most likely to dissociate their individual self from that situation and block it from their mind completely. This form of a solution allows the person to forget the experience and not feel the pain. In “Immune to Reality” Daniel Gilbert describes how every human being contains a psychological immune system, which works to shield us from horrible experiences that threaten our happiness. When experiencing a traumatic event, the psychological immune system responds by “cooking up the facts”, meaning taking the facts of the situation and turning the negative aspects of it into positive views. At first

“It takes a village to raise a child” (Goldberg). This old African proverb justifies that the upbringing of a child is a communal effort. The exposure to society and growing accustomed to the realities of life are beneficial to the growth of a child. These words hold a symbolic meaning to the importance of society and morality. Turning a blind eye to these words of wisdom deprive children of their understanding of humanity. This signifies the innocence of a child growing up in isolation as in Donoghue’s Room. Emma Donoghue uses her novel Room to illustrate that morality is a construct of society and growing up in isolation significantly narrows a child’s perception of life. Living in a

Helen evidently has PTSD from the rape she experienced over twenty years ago. Since the topic of the trauma itself has been avoided most of her life, it has been easy for her to repress the memories which have been lying dormant in her unconscious mind. Revisiting the place of the rape triggered memories, emotions, and thoughts associated with the traumatic event which caused her to experience symptoms of PTSD. Her PTSD symptoms are a reaction to a situational variable demonstrated by her unconscious defenses as her memories came back into her conscious mind. Strean (2000)

Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery provides not only greater understanding of how a traumatic event may defined but also the ways in which the effects of the experience may have a significantly repressing effect on the present and future self. Traumatic events are impressing on the self because they overwhelm the conventional emotional and physical perceptions that humanity has adjusted and modified their selves to. As traumatic events generally involve threats to the emotional and physical self, they differ from common misfortunes as they confront the victim with the feeling of extreme terror and helplessness that in result causes the individual to perceive the experience as one that was out of their control. As Herman reiterates, according to the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, “The common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of “intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation” (Herman 104). However, it is the response to the traumatic event in the emotional or conscious self that may differ from one another as there are three differing reactions to the terror factor of trauma: hyper-arousal, intrusion, and disconnection. Throughout this essay the work of Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery as well as Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower will be utilized to illustrated the compromising effects a traumatic experience such as childhood sexual abuse may have on the development of a young teen and the ways in

Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery was an amazing read because it tackles the question of “What does it actually mean to be traumatized?” Every single person, no matter how old, has experienced some level of fear— especially those of us who live in NYC! Whether it’s a yellow cab running a red light as you cross 56th Street, the aggressive homeless man on the 6 train who can’t accept the fact that you don’t have any spare change to give, or that time you decided to have street meat for dinner and were stuck on the toilet for the remainder of your night, we can all identify the ways in which our body responds to moments of distress. You may break out into a sprint, your heart beats against your chest as you sweat profusely, and you might even shed tears. In those moments, your entire existence becomes focused around the perceived life or death situation.

Others, though, may not be able to cope; their experience may be more haunting or terrifying than others. Each individual expresses situations in different forms; some of us are weaker and unable to control the vivid intrusive memories of the incident. The impression appears at any time, apparently unprovoked, and they interfere with their daily