Ma's Decision

During Ma's interview, the reporter asked a question that I hadn't considered before. She asked Ma whether Ma had ever considered sending Jack to an orphanage or somehow getting him out of Room. This would mean that he wouldn't have to grow up in Room, even if it meant being away from Ma. The reporter did not realize that Ma was actually the one who wanted to have Jack, and Ma viewed Jack as her "savior" because Jack gave her a reason to live. However, I realized that Ma's choice of having a child and raising it in Room could be almost seen as a form of child abuse. Even though Jack improved Ma's life drastically by giving her a reason to live, I don't think Ma really considered the child's life, and in many ways she got lucky in how well Jack turned out.

First of all, Ma was relatively young and inexperienced to have a child, and she had very little experience taking care of children. She also had no other help in raising Jack besides Old Nick, and Old Nick knew even less about child raising than Ma did. Ma seems to have raised Jack by trial and error, and she got lucky that she was able to raise such an intelligent child. Ma also didn't know that Old Nick wouldn't hurt or abuse Jack, and if Old Nick had wanted to, Ma could not have done anything to stop him. It surprised me how little Old Nick seemed to know about the child, and I was also surprised by the fact that in 5 years, Old Nick had never once seen Jack. Another risk that Ma took was that she had to hope that Jack would stay healthy, and although she did a good job of making sure he washed his hands to keep germs away, she could not guarantee that he wouldn't get an illness, and she would not have been able to treat him, especially given how reluctant Old Nick was to get medicine during the "great escape." Ma could not have known that all of these bad things would not happen to Jack, so she was risking a lot when she decided that she wanted a child.

Although many of the things that could have gone wrong with Ma's raising of Jack did not happen, we do not know if or how severe the problems with Jack are. First of all, Jack was obviously not getting enough nutrition, as seen by his small size. This is not surprising given how little food we see Jack and Ma eating in Room, and also the low quality of the food. Jack also has many problems with spacial perception, and although the doctors seemed to think he would get better at judging long distances, there is no way to know for sure. Finally, Ma was obviously not planning for the distant future when she had Jack, because it would have been extremally hard, if not impossible, for Ma to keep Jack satisfied in the room for more than a couple years after he had turned 5, and after that some sort of confrontation between Old Nick and Jack would have occurred. Overall, although I understand that Jack saved Ma by giving her a purpose in life, I also think that she perhaps should have thought through the consequences of having a child, even though in the novel she got lucky and nothing terrible happened to Jack.

Old Nick's relationship with Jack

Throughout the first two sections in the book, we have seen a couple of very important interactions between Old Nick and Jack, and I think that there "relationship" is a very complex and intricate one. First off, we do hear Old Nick refer to Jack as coming from Old Nick, so we can conclude that Old Nick is Jack's father. But from there the relationship gets a lot more complicated. First off, as far as we can tell Old Nick has never interacted with Jack before the beginning of this novel, which seems to imply that Old Nick does not have any emotional attachment to Jack. However, when Old Nick finds about about Jack's birthday, he brings Jack a toy car (which was probably not cheap, especially considering that Old Nick had been recently laid off). This toy car can be seen as a sord of bribery to make Jack like Old Nick more, but it also can be seen as some sort of fatherly duty. We also know that Old Nick buys "Sunday Treats" for Jack and also has never hurt him in the 5 years since Jack was born. We don't have enough facts to conclude whether or not Old Nick has any affection for Jack, or if his motives behind his seemingly kind gestures are solely for nefarious purposes.

Jack's view of Old Nick is even more complicated, as Jack doesn't have a category to put Old Nick in, since Jack doesn't realize that other humans exist besides Ma and himself. Jack tries to connect Old Nick to a god like figure, when he asks Ma why they thank God instead of Old Nick, when Old Nick is the one who brings them food and stuff. But later, after Old Nick hurts Ma, Jack seems to truly hate Old Nick, and threatens to "hurt" Old Nick if Old Nick ever tries to hurt Ma again. Jacks opinions throughout the first chapter and into the second one seem to be mixed about Old Nick, but by the time Ma and Jack begin discussing escaping, Jack seems to utterly hate and fear Old Nick, and there is nothing left of the perhaps awe or thankfulness Jack had for the Sunday treats or the toy car.

I suspect that as Jack begins to figure out how evil Old Nick is, Jack will begin to hate him even more, but at least for the first two chapters, Jack's view of Old Nick seems to be going up and down, and Jack's lack of understanding of concepts of what we consider the real world does not help him when he is trying to figure out how to view Old Nick. I'll be interested to see how this relationship evolves in the rest of the book, as Jack begins to realize that Old Nick is truly a despicable person.

Problems with The Memory of Running

After reading The Memory of Running, I realized that I have a couple problems with the stories realistic nature, and so I thought I would write about these problems as my final post on The Memory of Running. In my previous post, I wrote about how surprised I was by the complete lack of training or skill either of Bethany's psychologists had, and how I was not sure if it was really realistic that the psychologists would let Bethany live a normal life when she was obviously capable of terrible things such as murdering Count's dog, but there were a couple other problems I also had with the novel.

One of my biggest problems with the first half of the novel was how Smithy so easily adjusted to biking 10 hours a day, living off bananas, and not smoking or drinking. For someone who was as dependant on alcohol and nicotine as Smithy was, it seems very unrealistic that he would be able to go cold turkey and still be able to function normally, which Smithy seems to do. Smithy rarely if ever mentions any desire to drink or smoke after he leaves, which seems like a giant change for someone who was physically and emotionally addicted to these drugs. Smithy also seems to be able to ignore his lack of physical fitness, and although he complains about being in some physical pain towards the beginning of his journey, he doesn't seem to really be experiencing as much pain as I would expect a middle age man who weighed almost 300 pounds to feel when he was riding a tiny bike for 10 hours a day. The fact that Smithy was able to keep going despite his lack of physical prowess, is even more impressive given the injuries he sustained at the beginning of the journey, yet he still is able to bike and not need to eat much, which again strikes me as a little far fetched.

The other scene in the novel that really strikes me as unrealistic is when the girl biker tried to sleep with Smithy, but Smithy turned her down. Although this is a heroic refusal by Smithy, especially given his weird views of women that aren't Bethany or Norma, it also seems a little unrealistic that this random women would try to sleep with Smithy. First of all, he hadn't had a real shower for weeks, so there is no way that he smelled at all pleasant, even with the rare "sink baths." Also, after losing 50+ pounds, Smithy would have a large amount of baggy skin, which, combined with his unshaven hair/beard, wouldn't make him very physically attractive either. It could be she was attracted to his intellectual/emotional side, but he doesn't come off as having much of a personality in any of the scenes where she sees him. This combination makes Smithy seem like a very surprising choice for the women to sleep with. All of these facts that seem far-fetched made the novel less realistic for me, but still entertaining.

A Review of Bethany's Psychologists

In The Memory of Running, the most disturbing scene in the entire book to me was when Smithy found Count's dog in the freezer after Bethany had presumably stuffed it there. This, more than anything else Bethany had done, reinforced the fact that she is truly mentally unstable, and that she needs serious attention. Her high school prom scene, although also disturbing, can be seen as almost justified given how she was being treated, and thus this scene wasn't quite as disturbing to me. However, the dog had done nothing more than walk across her presents, which definitely doesn't seem like an offense worth killing over, yet Bethany did just that. Although it may be argued that the voice was what killed the dog, and not Bethany, I think that this just points to how intertwined Bethany and the voice have become and how difficult they are to distinguish.

This scene with Bethany also got me thinking on how unrealistically incompetent her psychologists are. The first "golfer" psychologist didn't even believe that Bethany had a serious problem and took an overall flippant attitude towards treating her. He did not seem to be trying to make her better and didn't seem to be treating her or preventing her from harming herself or others. Dr. Glass is almost as bad, as she completely misjudges Bethany, believing the outlandish lies that Bethany tells. Dr. Glass also seems completely at a loss when Bethany's voice truly comes back, which surprised me, since isn't she supposed to be a trained psychologist ?Glass's incompetence is evident in her lack of knowledge of her patient and her seemingly inability to do anything once Bethany froze up.

Glass's biggest failure though was when Smithy called her concerned about the dog, and she tells Smithy that he is crazy for thinking that, because Bethany is harmless and would never hurt another creature. She then, rather obnoxiously, tells Smithy to never call her again. I thought she might feel a little bad for what she incorrectly accused him of earlier in the novel, but she didn't show any signs of remorse in this scene. Plus, Glass was absolutely wrong, because Bethany did murder the dog, so Bethany obviously is capable of that level of violence. Overall, this left me with very little respect for the psychologists that treated Bethany, because Bethany is obviously capable of harming others and herself despite what these psychologists say. The lack of skill in her psychologists also seems a little unrealistic to me, given that it was the late 20th century, and they should have been better educated and equipped to deal with cases such as Bethany.