While reading Room, I remembered something I had read in an article written by a mother of a young boy with Asperger's Syndrome (a quick rundown for those unfamiliar with the syndrome: Asperger's is part of the autism spectrum. It's generally more mild than fully blown autism, but it affects social interaction, nonverbal communication, and several other things.) In the article, she described how her son was getting ready for a car ride when he asked for her help in securing the "backwards seven." She had no idea what he was talking about, until she realized that he was talking about his seat belt, which would look like a backwards seven to him when he looked down on it. Jack's terms for things that he's just now discovering made me think of this.
There are other things that Jack does that make remind me of aspie behaviors, like his difficulty speaking to people other than his mother when he first leaves the room. While I doubt Jack really is on the autism spectrum, it's interesting to compare his behavior to the behavior of neurodiverse people. It really brings into context how damaging being trapped in Room was to his development.
Yeah, I can definitely pin a lot of developmental health issues onto Jack. It's interesting to think if these issues still would have been prevalent if he hadn't been raised in Room. I guess we can't truly tell, but I definitely think that Room had a negative affect on his language and development, despite Ma's hard work to prevent it.
ReplyDeleteLike so much in this book (a theme I fear I've pounded to death in discussion), here we see Jack doing in a more extreme form what's pretty typical for kids in the early-language years, to come up with their own idiosyncratic terms for things that parents and siblings understand but outsiders will find confusing. It's interesting that some of Jack's terms seem to be part of a private frame of reference between him and Ma, maybe even terms that she taught him or that just developed between them, and some seem to be his invention. We don't know where the "Table," "Bed," "Bath" stuff comes from originally--whether Ma *taught* him these as if they were proper nouns, or whether Jack simply thinks of them this way because he's totally unaware that these *aren't* the only bed, table, bath, door, etc. in existence.
ReplyDeleteHis extreme isolation creates its own kind of verbal creativity, and this may indeed bear some relation to the ways Asperger's keeps a child in a kind of virtual social isolation, with similar effects. There's every indication that Jack will gradually be able to acclimate to the wider world, as his symptoms seem largely a response to unusual and extreme circumstances.