Pomona's Hero's Journey Blog

I’ve read Room up to 2/3 of the way through After. This post isn’t going to go any further than that.                 Throughout After I’ve been seeing a lot of what we talked about on Friday: jamais vu, or defamiliarization. But another interesting trend I’ve seen has been our defamiliarization through Jack’s eyes to his world. As Jack learns about our world in relation to his, we learn so much about his world in relation to ours. By reacting with surprise to the new things that he finds in the normal world, Jack creates a sort of retroactive surprise about Room in the reader.                 The best example of this reaction is when Jack is changing to get ready for his first day Outside. As he dons a fresh hospital gown, Ma throws his shirt in the trash, calling it “a rag.” To Jack, who’s never known any different, his shirts a...

So we spent all of Thursday in class talking about Jefferson’s diary, and I don’t know about second hour, but in seventh about half the class was at least sniffling by the end of class. Nevertheless, we had a really good discussion about the chapter. We touched on questions like “Has Jefferson succeeded?” “What will Jefferson’s legacy be?” “What has Jefferson learned and what do we think about his inevitable death?” But through all of this discussion, the undercurrent was “What makes this chapter sad?” Shall we count the ways? At every level of construction, this chapter is full of aching beauty. Let’s go from the smallest building blocks up. At the word and sentence level, the chapter is a complete and obvious break from the rest of the book. Since Jefferson hasn’t learned to read and write as well as the other narrator, Grant, his journal doesn’t use correct spelling or grammar. Instead, it lacks most punctuation and spells phonetically and in vernacular. These stylist...