Significant Passage

“In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit…Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.”

Donoghue, Emma. Room: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown and, 2010. Print.

The novel “Room” by Emma Donoghue tells the story of an innocent college student who gets abducted by a male stranger.  She is forced to live the next seven years of her life in an eleven by eleven foot shed in his backyard.  During that time she gets pregnant with a son she names Jack, and he lives the first five years of his life with her in what they call “room”.  All Jack knew from the time he was born to the time when the narration of the book takes place was that “room” was all there was, everything else he had heard of as being real was just T.V. and fictional.  The role of environment and setting in this book helps to show how environment/setting can affect a person’s mindset and understanding of everything in the world. Throughout the first part of the book, Jack learns that there is more in the world than just himself, his mother, Old Nick, and “room”, that there is a whole outside world full of amazing things, yet Jack has no indication that there is an outside world that could hold a bigger and better life for both him and his mother.  When Jack and his mom finally decide to do an escape attempt, Jack is the hero and gets both of them away from “room”, which was supposed to be a good thing until Jack realizes it wasn’t everything he wanted.  Jack gets used to it though, and he begins to warm up to his new life in the real world.  He starts to understand the bigger things in life and himself as a person. Being away from the restrictions of room had allowed Jack to explore a whole new setting with all new things.

I think Emma Donoghue did an exceptional job writing this novel. She picked out all of the key ideas that a five year old would have done in the situation and she really knew how to show his reaction to the whole situation.  She also did a great job incorporating how Jack’s environment/setting in both “room” and the real world affected his understanding of himself and how the world functions as a whole.  When Jack was restricted to “room” he wasn’t able to understand everything because he couldn’t physically come in contact with it, all he could understand and view as real was what occurred and lived inside “room”.  Jack’s mindset was set in “room” and only “room” because that was all he ever knew and it allowed Jack to have a very simple life.  Once Jack entered the outside world, Emma Donoghue describes very well how Jack feels uncomfortable and unstable because of such a drastic change in his lifestyle.  Jack has to learn how the world works and how it’s different from his lifestyle in “room”.  My significant quote above describes how Jack reacts to the new things in his life, how he feels like there is less time in the outside world because he always had so much time in “room”. The significance of environment/setting in this quote is shown clearly by how Jack reacts while in “room” and while in the real world.  The environment that an individual grows up in has huge impacts on their understanding and view of the world.              

Throughout our model capstone project we have been analyzing how environment and setting play a role in one’s life.  Environment can be seen on a large and broader scale as the entire world, an ecosystem, or even just a city, analyzing how these broad differences in setting can affect a person’s life.  But the effects of environment and setting can also be analyzed on a much smaller, microscopic scale, like how it affects one’s health and wellbeing.  The whole idea of the capstone project is to start with a broad topic and link in narrower, yet still very significant topics that relate to the broad topic through articles and novels.  I think doing the model capstone project was affective in helping me understand how to piece different aspects of one broad topic together.  Starting out with the broad topic of environment/setting and gradually building in more narrow topics that connect with the broad topic was a perfect way to analyze and understand all of the things that really make environment/setting what it is.  This model capstone project also helped me to understand how to build in the narrower topics.  For example, I would have never thought of utilizing a text that talked about all of the chemicals in our bodies, because that doesn’t really mean environment and setting to me.  Now, after analyzing the topic of harmful chemicals on our bodies it makes sense that it is a much narrower topic under environment and setting and I understand now that it fits the broader topic perfectly.  Overall, I believe that this project was effective in my understanding of how to put together my own capstone project and putting all of the pieces of the broader topic together.