November 16, 2025 • 10 mins
Detailing the experience of a five-year-old boy named Jack and his mother. The narrative, told from Jack’s perspective, chronicles their life confined to a single room—a shed referred to simply as "Room"—by their captor, known as Old Nick. The story progresses through different sections titled Presents, Unlying, Dying, After, and Living, marking the timeline from Jack's fifth birthday to their eventual escape and subsequent adjustment to the outside world, which Jack initially believes is only real via television. The text also includes an epigraph from a poem by Simonides and a list of other works by the author, confirming the source is a work of fiction.
You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Room-Novel-Emma-Donoghue/dp/0316098337?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=621f73067a1b80a7f2127ba0159a41f7&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Room-Novel-Emma-Donoghue/dp/0316098337?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=621f73067a1b80a7f2127ba0159a41f7&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive. Okay, so you know how
this works. We take the sources, cut through the noise,
and get right to the heart of it exactly. Today
it's a bit different. We're diving deep into a novel room.
We're trying to get inside the head of someone whose
whole world just explodes outwards.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah. It's all through the eyes of Jack, who's five
years old, and his entire reality, everything he knows is
this one tiny space. It's quite a chilling look at well, captivity, language, identity.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And how you adapter or maybe struggle to adapt when
everything changes overnight.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Right, It's a journey from captivity to freedom, but freedom
itself is complicated.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
So our mission today is to follow Jack's path, starting
inside that eleven by eleven foot box he thinks is
the whole universe, and it all really kicks off on
one particular day.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
His fifth birthday. He counted out, you know, zero, one, two, three,
four and now five. He is a very ordered sense
of time within his tiny world.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
And that world has very specific furniture, doesn't it. Stove
rug bed skylight.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
That's a big one where God's face sometimes looks in
he thinks, and.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
The walls have pictures. Ma calls them great masterpieces of
Western art. He even knows the numbers. Three eight eleven.
Guernica is one.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, Guernica. Imagine seeing that every day as a child
in that context. Yeah. And then there's TV.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
TV is huge, it's mass connection. But also how she
defines reality for Jack. There's real things.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Like spider, mouse, plant, Yeah, the things inside room.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
And then there's TV things, dogs, cats, mountains, people mostly
except Old Nick. Of course he's real, right.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Old Nick is the exception. And this whole system, this categorization,
it's Ma's way of coping, of surviving, keeping things ordered.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
She's also managing pain, isn't she that whole mind over
matter thing?
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Absolutely trying desperately not to get hooked on painkillers Old
Nick might bring. She needs to stay sharp and control
the only thing she can control, her mind and Jack's world.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
But then that control, that careful structure, it just breaks.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, that leads us into a jacking.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
The great unlying. Ma has to tell him the truth.
Why now, what's the trigger?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
It's desperation, really, it can expect to her own story.
She finally tells Jack how she was kidnapped. She was nineteen.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Old Nick tricked her something about a sick dog.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Exactly, lured her into his truck, blindfolded her, locked her away.
But the immediate reason, she tells Jack now is well
survival plant. Their little plant barely died because the power
went out it got too cold, and.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
She's afraid of something she calls foreclosure.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, she overhears old Nick talking about money problems. She's
terrified he'll just run out of money, maybe abandon them,
leave them to starve. He'd threatened that before if she
tried to escape.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So the fear isn't just captivity anymore, it's abandonment being
discarded mocisely.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
That fear forces her hand. She needs to get Jack out,
needs him to help.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
And telling him the truth. I mean, the whole world
on TV, all those people, cars, trees, it's actually real.
How does he even process that?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
He doesn't not really, it's complete confusion, terror, Even the
idea of millions of people just shatters his understanding of everything.
His whole language system breaks down, So.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
The unlying is less a revelation and more like a
bomb going off in his head.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Totally, which is why Plan A fails almost immediately right.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Plan A was pretend Jack is sick, so Old Nick
takes him to a hospital.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah, but Jack refuses. He won't leave room without Ma.
They're completely codependent. Their identities are fused in.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That space, which forces plan B, Plan B the dead
bit trick. Okay, let's move into that section. Jack calls
it dying, and.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
It's incredibly tense because it's all from his five year
old perspective. Ma wraps him up tight in rug, tells
him to play corpse, to be stiff, stiff, stiff.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
He has to stay absolutely still when Old Nick comes in.
B B.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
That's the sound of the keypad. Old Nick comes in,
s he's the rolled up rug, thinks Jack is dead inside.
He lifts them.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
It's heavy. Jack feels squished, crushed against him, and he
soils himself from the pressure and the fear.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, it's this moment of tense physical violation. He's just praying,
trying to stay stiff, focusing on the physical sensations, the
awfulness of it, not even thinking about freedom yet.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Then the truck. He's in the back of Old Nick's
brown truck.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
What happens pure sensory overload. He manages to wriggle a
bit get his head out of the rug. Suddenly there's
roaring sounds, bumping, flashing lights, trees, houses flying past.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
It's chaos, nothing like the quiet predictability of room.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Nothing. He has his note Mob gave him hidden, supposed
to signal for help, but it's wet now. He tries
to use it when Old Nick stops and drops him
on the street near a man walking a jeet.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, a jeet with a baby and a dog. Jack
thinks the dog might be a vampire from TV. He's
just completely overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And then the police arrive. Officer Oh.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
She takes him where to the precinct first.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
The precinct then plays called the Cumberland Clinic, and everything
is still just strange and confusing. He sees Ma again,
but she's crying. Doctor Clay wear's a mask, there are
blinds on the window. It's all wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
And when they ask him how Oldneck hurt him, what
does he say?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
It's fascinating. He only mentions the physical acts from the
escape itself. He dropped me in the truck and also
on the street, the seven years of captivity, the psychological
damage that doesn't register as hurt in the same immediate
way for him.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Wow, And that escape, of course throws them straight into
the media spotlight.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Oh instantly, he's miracle Jack or sometimes cruelly the bomb's
eye boy. Ma tries to shield him, but it's everywhere.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
And that TV interview that's rough, It really is.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
The interviewer, the puffy hairwoman, she just goes for it,
asks Ma about the tragedy of your still.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Birth, Ma's first baby who died.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yes, born with a cord around her neck, and then
the interviewer brings up the fact Ma was still breastfeeding
Jack even at five. It's presented as you know, weird,
maybe unhealthy.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
How does Ma handle that?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
She pushes back hard, says, he had a childhood with me,
whether you'd call it normal or not. She defends her
choices fiercely, what she did to keep him alive well
as okay as possible.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
But that public judgment and must make adjusting even harder.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Absolutely, which brings us to the next stage, which Jack
calls living and it's messy. They move in with Grandma, yeah,
Ground's house, and suddenly it's not just Ma and Jack.
There's Grandma. There's step of Grandma's partner who tries to
teach Jack about Lego families.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And Grandpa's there too, isn't he? But he seems uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
He shudders. Jack says he just can't seem to look
at Jack without seeing the trauma, the circumstances of his birth.
It's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And Jack gets his own room for the first.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Time, right Emma's room in Jack's room, the idea of
separate spaces for thinking alone, it's actually terrifying for him.
It's the complete opposite of the shared identity in her room.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
He's trying to figure out this new world outside. He says,
it has a cloak of invisibility.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, because things he learned were just TV or suddenly
real cars, trees, crowds, but the rules are different. A
climbing frame at the playground isn't a fireman's pole for
escaping danger. It's just a playpole. His reality keeps shifting
under his feet.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
He also gets upset about losing something small, right Ma's tooth.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Ma's bad tooth. Yes, it fell out back in room
and he kept it. Now it's lost, maybe swallowed, maybe
just gone, and he grieves it like losing a part
of Ma, a part of their shared past, a part
of himself. That sense of fragmentation is growing.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And Ma's changing too, definitely.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
She starts drinking coffee. She seems more withdrawn. Jack says,
she's getting rusty at everything. She's struggling massively with freedom,
with being Ma outside of a room, of their being
herself again after so long.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
She has to be a mother, a daughter, a survivor
all at once.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And Jack, the person who saved her, is also this constant,
living reminder of everything she endured. It's incredibly complex.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Which leads to that really pivotal moment. They go back
to room.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Jack pushes for it, he needs to see it. But
when they get there, it's not room anymore. It's just
a small gray shed in Old Knick's backyard, police tape everywhere.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Like that, small and empty. How does Ma react?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
It almost breaks her seeing the physical reality script of
the life they lived in it. She just whispers, I
wish she was dead, meaning old Nick.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Wow, that's heavy. The trauma is still so.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Present, absolutely, and Jack goes inside one last time with
the officer. Oh, it feels wrong, empty, he says it himself.
It's not room. The magic, the meaning they imposed on
it is gone. Does he take anything, No, he leads
the broken toys, jeep and remote. It's like closing a
chapter finally.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
But Ma's struggle isn't over even when they move into
their own place, the independent living apartment.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Not at all. She tells Jack, I'm having to remember
how to be me as well at the same time,
and it's she trails off. She's trying to rebuild herself,
and Jack.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Asks her that devastating question.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah, do you sometimes wish we didn't escape?
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Ooh? That just sums up the whole ambiguity, doesn't it.
Freedom isn't simple. Room was horrific, but it was defined.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Exactly outside is huge and terrifying and unpredictable. Ma says no,
she doesn't wish that, but the fact he even has
to ask it shows the deep cost of leaving that
defined world.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
How does it end? What's the final feeling it ends?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
With them in the new apartment. Jack's worried Mo might
start calling him by a different name, like Michael or
Zaan now that they're in the real world, but she
reassures him. What did she say, I'll always call you Jack.
It's about confirming his identity, his unique self in this vast,
scary new reality.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So Jack's journey it's not just escaping a room. It's
about how identity itself is shaped by our containers, by
our boundaries.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Completely. He moves from this fantasy narrative more created to
protect him, into this messy, overwhelming reality. He has to become,
as he puts.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It, scathe, scaredy brave, scaredy brave.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Moving from being entirely defined by room to finding out
who Jack is when room is gone, and realizing freedom
doesn't come with instructions.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
His biggest hurdle was just getting out. It was figuring
out how to be Jack when the world keeps shifting,
keep unlying itself. As you'd say, there's that line Massas
people move around so much out in the world, things
get lost all the time. It makes you think, right,
if Jack's whole sense of self was forged in that
eleven by eleven space, what parts of ourselves do we
(10:20):
lose or maybe gain when our own worlds expand or contract,
when we step into bigger spaces or maybe retreat into
smaller ones. What boundaries define your reality and what happens
when they start to dissolve? Something to think about.
Welcome to the deep dive. Okay, so you know how
this works. We take the sources, cut through the noise,
and get right to the heart of it exactly. Today
it's a bit different. We're diving deep into a novel room.
We're trying to get inside the head of someone whose
whole world just explodes outwards.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah. It's all through the eyes of Jack, who's five
years old, and his entire reality, everything he knows is
this one tiny space. It's quite a chilling look at well, captivity, language, identity.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And how you adapter or maybe struggle to adapt when
everything changes overnight.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Right, It's a journey from captivity to freedom, but freedom
itself is complicated.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
So our mission today is to follow Jack's path, starting
inside that eleven by eleven foot box he thinks is
the whole universe, and it all really kicks off on
one particular day.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
His fifth birthday. He counted out, you know, zero, one, two, three,
four and now five. He is a very ordered sense
of time within his tiny world.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
And that world has very specific furniture, doesn't it. Stove
rug bed skylight.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
That's a big one where God's face sometimes looks in
he thinks, and.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
The walls have pictures. Ma calls them great masterpieces of
Western art. He even knows the numbers. Three eight eleven.
Guernica is one.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, Guernica. Imagine seeing that every day as a child
in that context. Yeah. And then there's TV.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
TV is huge, it's mass connection. But also how she
defines reality for Jack. There's real things.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Like spider, mouse, plant, Yeah, the things inside room.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
And then there's TV things, dogs, cats, mountains, people mostly
except Old Nick. Of course he's real, right.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Old Nick is the exception. And this whole system, this categorization,
it's Ma's way of coping, of surviving, keeping things ordered.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
She's also managing pain, isn't she that whole mind over
matter thing?
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Absolutely trying desperately not to get hooked on painkillers Old
Nick might bring. She needs to stay sharp and control
the only thing she can control, her mind and Jack's world.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
But then that control, that careful structure, it just breaks.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, that leads us into a jacking.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
The great unlying. Ma has to tell him the truth.
Why now, what's the trigger?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
It's desperation, really, it can expect to her own story.
She finally tells Jack how she was kidnapped. She was nineteen.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Old Nick tricked her something about a sick dog.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Exactly, lured her into his truck, blindfolded her, locked her away.
But the immediate reason, she tells Jack now is well
survival plant. Their little plant barely died because the power
went out it got too cold, and.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
She's afraid of something she calls foreclosure.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, she overhears old Nick talking about money problems. She's
terrified he'll just run out of money, maybe abandon them,
leave them to starve. He'd threatened that before if she
tried to escape.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So the fear isn't just captivity anymore, it's abandonment being
discarded mocisely.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
That fear forces her hand. She needs to get Jack out,
needs him to help.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
And telling him the truth. I mean, the whole world
on TV, all those people, cars, trees, it's actually real.
How does he even process that?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
He doesn't not really, it's complete confusion, terror, Even the
idea of millions of people just shatters his understanding of everything.
His whole language system breaks down, So.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
The unlying is less a revelation and more like a
bomb going off in his head.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Totally, which is why Plan A fails almost immediately right.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Plan A was pretend Jack is sick, so Old Nick
takes him to a hospital.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah, but Jack refuses. He won't leave room without Ma.
They're completely codependent. Their identities are fused in.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That space, which forces plan B, Plan B the dead
bit trick. Okay, let's move into that section. Jack calls
it dying, and.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
It's incredibly tense because it's all from his five year
old perspective. Ma wraps him up tight in rug, tells
him to play corpse, to be stiff, stiff, stiff.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
He has to stay absolutely still when Old Nick comes in.
B B.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
That's the sound of the keypad. Old Nick comes in,
s he's the rolled up rug, thinks Jack is dead inside.
He lifts them.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
It's heavy. Jack feels squished, crushed against him, and he
soils himself from the pressure and the fear.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, it's this moment of tense physical violation. He's just praying,
trying to stay stiff, focusing on the physical sensations, the
awfulness of it, not even thinking about freedom yet.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Then the truck. He's in the back of Old Nick's
brown truck.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
What happens pure sensory overload. He manages to wriggle a
bit get his head out of the rug. Suddenly there's
roaring sounds, bumping, flashing lights, trees, houses flying past.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
It's chaos, nothing like the quiet predictability of room.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Nothing. He has his note Mob gave him hidden, supposed
to signal for help, but it's wet now. He tries
to use it when Old Nick stops and drops him
on the street near a man walking a jeet.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, a jeet with a baby and a dog. Jack
thinks the dog might be a vampire from TV. He's
just completely overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And then the police arrive. Officer Oh.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
She takes him where to the precinct first.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
The precinct then plays called the Cumberland Clinic, and everything
is still just strange and confusing. He sees Ma again,
but she's crying. Doctor Clay wear's a mask, there are
blinds on the window. It's all wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
And when they ask him how Oldneck hurt him, what
does he say?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
It's fascinating. He only mentions the physical acts from the
escape itself. He dropped me in the truck and also
on the street, the seven years of captivity, the psychological
damage that doesn't register as hurt in the same immediate
way for him.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Wow, And that escape, of course throws them straight into
the media spotlight.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Oh instantly, he's miracle Jack or sometimes cruelly the bomb's
eye boy. Ma tries to shield him, but it's everywhere.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
And that TV interview that's rough, It really is.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
The interviewer, the puffy hairwoman, she just goes for it,
asks Ma about the tragedy of your still.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Birth, Ma's first baby who died.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Yes, born with a cord around her neck, and then
the interviewer brings up the fact Ma was still breastfeeding
Jack even at five. It's presented as you know, weird,
maybe unhealthy.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
How does Ma handle that?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
She pushes back hard, says, he had a childhood with me,
whether you'd call it normal or not. She defends her
choices fiercely, what she did to keep him alive well
as okay as possible.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
But that public judgment and must make adjusting even harder.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Absolutely, which brings us to the next stage, which Jack
calls living and it's messy. They move in with Grandma, yeah,
Ground's house, and suddenly it's not just Ma and Jack.
There's Grandma. There's step of Grandma's partner who tries to
teach Jack about Lego families.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And Grandpa's there too, isn't he? But he seems uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
He shudders. Jack says he just can't seem to look
at Jack without seeing the trauma, the circumstances of his birth.
It's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And Jack gets his own room for the first.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Time, right Emma's room in Jack's room, the idea of
separate spaces for thinking alone, it's actually terrifying for him.
It's the complete opposite of the shared identity in her room.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
He's trying to figure out this new world outside. He says,
it has a cloak of invisibility.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, because things he learned were just TV or suddenly
real cars, trees, crowds, but the rules are different. A
climbing frame at the playground isn't a fireman's pole for
escaping danger. It's just a playpole. His reality keeps shifting
under his feet.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
He also gets upset about losing something small, right Ma's tooth.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Ma's bad tooth. Yes, it fell out back in room
and he kept it. Now it's lost, maybe swallowed, maybe
just gone, and he grieves it like losing a part
of Ma, a part of their shared past, a part
of himself. That sense of fragmentation is growing.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
And Ma's changing too, definitely.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
She starts drinking coffee. She seems more withdrawn. Jack says,
she's getting rusty at everything. She's struggling massively with freedom,
with being Ma outside of a room, of their being
herself again after so long.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
She has to be a mother, a daughter, a survivor
all at once.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And Jack, the person who saved her, is also this constant,
living reminder of everything she endured. It's incredibly complex.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Which leads to that really pivotal moment. They go back
to room.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Jack pushes for it, he needs to see it. But
when they get there, it's not room anymore. It's just
a small gray shed in Old Knick's backyard, police tape everywhere.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Like that, small and empty. How does Ma react?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
It almost breaks her seeing the physical reality script of
the life they lived in it. She just whispers, I
wish she was dead, meaning old Nick.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Wow, that's heavy. The trauma is still so.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Present, absolutely, and Jack goes inside one last time with
the officer. Oh, it feels wrong, empty, he says it himself.
It's not room. The magic, the meaning they imposed on
it is gone. Does he take anything, No, he leads
the broken toys, jeep and remote. It's like closing a
chapter finally.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
But Ma's struggle isn't over even when they move into
their own place, the independent living apartment.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Not at all. She tells Jack, I'm having to remember
how to be me as well at the same time,
and it's she trails off. She's trying to rebuild herself,
and Jack.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Asks her that devastating question.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah, do you sometimes wish we didn't escape?
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Ooh? That just sums up the whole ambiguity, doesn't it.
Freedom isn't simple. Room was horrific, but it was defined.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Exactly outside is huge and terrifying and unpredictable. Ma says no,
she doesn't wish that, but the fact he even has
to ask it shows the deep cost of leaving that
defined world.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
How does it end? What's the final feeling it ends?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
With them in the new apartment. Jack's worried Mo might
start calling him by a different name, like Michael or
Zaan now that they're in the real world, but she
reassures him. What did she say, I'll always call you Jack.
It's about confirming his identity, his unique self in this vast,
scary new reality.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So Jack's journey it's not just escaping a room. It's
about how identity itself is shaped by our containers, by
our boundaries.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Completely. He moves from this fantasy narrative more created to
protect him, into this messy, overwhelming reality. He has to become,
as he puts.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
It, scathe, scaredy brave, scaredy brave.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Moving from being entirely defined by room to finding out
who Jack is when room is gone, and realizing freedom
doesn't come with instructions.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
His biggest hurdle was just getting out. It was figuring
out how to be Jack when the world keeps shifting,
keep unlying itself. As you'd say, there's that line Massas
people move around so much out in the world, things
get lost all the time. It makes you think, right,
if Jack's whole sense of self was forged in that
eleven by eleven space, what parts of ourselves do we
(10:20):
lose or maybe gain when our own worlds expand or contract,
when we step into bigger spaces or maybe retreat into
smaller ones. What boundaries define your reality and what happens
when they start to dissolve? Something to think about.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.