Jack and Ma's Adjustment

Starting to read the sections of Room after Ma and Jack escape, and how Ma and Jack begin to adjust to being in the real world, I'm starting to get extremely concerned for Jack. Ma seems to be readjusting fairly well, as she was part of the world for many years before her capture, and seems very familiar with lots of things there. She does occasionally have had episodes caused by trauma, but given what she's been through that's completely understandable.

Jack, on the other hand, doesn't seem traumaticized by his experiences at all. He's still generally quite cheerful, and he is beginning to accept that Outside is a real place. He also does know a fair amount about Outside from the TV he's watched. My concern for Jack isn't that he's lost and overwhelmed in Outside, it's that he just doesn't like it as much as he likes Room. When Ma begins to get him new stuff and throw away the now useless things from Room, he often gets very upset and wishes he had all his things from Room back. He even asks to go back to Room to sleep, and wants to return there to get his old things, though Ma always refuses because she never wants to go back there.

It's obvious that Ma would never want to return to a place with such horrible memories, and I think none of us would want to either in the same situation. However we have to remember that while us and Ma see this as a prison because we know its place in the outside world, to Jack Room is his entire world. He had a lot of fun there with Ma, and she never portrayed it as a bad place to him, so he has no real reason to hate it. It's natural for a five-year old to go back to a place that he's very familiar with and has been his own life.

Another main reason Jack doesn't like Outside is that he's no longer always with Ma, though he's obviously extremely frightened of leaving her for even a second. Ma, after escaping, wants to have some time to herself and to actually live her own life. After being nothing but a mother for five years, it's obvious that she'd now want some time to rediscover herself and not to keep staying with Jack 24/7. Jack doesn't accept this, and I feel like this will lead to neither of them being able to become independent and adjust well. Ma will be unhappy as she, after being freed, is still sort of "trapped" by Jack, and Jack will become too dependent on Ma and won't be able to function by himself.

Old Nick

"Old Nick," as we know him through Jack's perception, can easily just be seen as a purely evil, one-dimensional character. But, I feel that he's actually a much more complex character, and he clearly has other motivations besides wanting to hurt and rape Ma. While he's clearly an absolutely horrible person and has committed terrible crimes, and I am in no way trying to justify what he does, I think that he was motivated by something completely human: the desire for a normal relationship; he just went around getting in about the darkest and most twisted way imaginable.

Something that's not immediately obvious about Old Nick from Jack and Ma's portrayals of him is that he clearly doesn't glorify or love violence against his captives. He has the capacity to be brutally violent when provoked by Ma trying to escape, as he absolutely cannot afford to let her get out, and we hear about several of those times, but those are only a few times, and there's nothing like that most days Ma is imprisoned. He also never tries to hurt Jack, more showing complete disregard for him with a small bit of interest once in a while (the Jeep is one example). 

It's this general lack of violence and anger that made Old Nick so unsettling to me at first. Knowing the premise of the book, I imagined that someone that would set up a prison like this would be completely brutal, and his interactions with Ma would be violent. However, hearing them talk through Jack's narration, their conversations were very disturbingly ordinary. They have normal talks about food, clothes, and other things, and Old Nick even makes a couple sarcastic remarks about how Ma's better off than him because he brings things for them. Going just by their general dynamics in conversation in the early book, you would guess that Ma and Old Nick are an somewhat unhappy couple trapped in a loveless marriage, not a kidnapping rapist and his victim. 

This domestic relationship and how Old Nick was playing the role of a husband was brought up in class today, and that really made it clear to me that what Old Nick wanted from all of this was a relationship. He was unsuccessful in doing this normally for whatever reasons, and so he kidnapped Ma to try and create one for himself. It's also not a completely dominant/submissive relationship that he was, but an equal one. He could easily just walk in each night, rape Ma, and leave, but instead he tries to engage in normal conversation with her, and keeps Jack and Ma much more well-supplied with food and clothes than we would expect. Even his rapes don't seem especially brutal, and Ma even asks him to "come to bed" a couple times when she's tired of him questioning about Jack. He seems to really care about Ma, but in a very twisted way, and wants them to have an equal relationship. This is evidenced by the way that she even seems to have some power over him. He only attacks her physically when she initiates it trying to escape, and he allows her to attack him verbally. When she's screaming at him to bury Jack far away, he even seems very timid and scared of her, which does not fit at all with his role in the imprisonment of Ma, but more with his imagined role of her partner. He's a horrible character with a twisted motivation, but maybe one that we can partially understand.

Norma

During last week's discussion about the ending of The Memory of Running, there was plenty of disagreement on how good/realistic the way that Norma appeared at the end was, and how well it fit with the rest of the book. However, pretty much everyone agreed on one thing: that Norma and Smithy should end up together. I was sort of surprised by this, as I personally really didn't like Norma's relationship with Smithy, as it seemed very strange to me. The dynamics of the relationship between Smithy and Norma don't actually change that much from when they're both kids to where they are at the end of the book. 

When Norma and Smithy are younger, we see that she sort of follows Smithy around a lot. She really wants his affection and for him to interact with her, though he often ignores her. She is very needy and generally annoying in how much she says he likes him. This is all very similar to the way Norma speaks during the phone calls. The way she says "I love you" to Smithy over and over again even though he never says it back is the same as how she used to say it to him before her accident and separation from the Ides. She is also still sort of searching for affection from Smithy, as she occasionally forces him into complimenting her by the way that she talks. A new part of her character is that she now often talks about how she is strong and independent, and how she can manage by herself. While this definitely shows how she's developed and how she's no longer just the little girl chasing after Smithy, I would say that there's definitely still an element of her trying to impress him by saying that she can manage by herself.

This parallel to their relationship from the past makes this seem to me like she's not the right choice for Smithy. He's come such a long way in so many other areas of his life with his journey across the country, and I was a bit disappointed that he didn't really evolve in this area of his life. He gets in better shape and stops drinking, gains a lot of confidence, and even is able to reflect on his feelings about Bethany. I understand that he wants to keep some connection to home, and Norma represents that, and that he needs help and funding on his journey, but I feel like this relationship limits his continued development. The other thing that makes me not like Smithy's relationship with Norma is that Smithy seems to feel that he has a responsibility to Norma because of how he abandoned her after the crash. It seems to me like he's sort of driven by guilt to stick with Norma and to have a relationship with her, as he clearly has a lot of regret about his earlier actions.

What do you guys think about the Smithy/Norma relationship?