Doubting Room's Narrative and The Mind of a 5 Year Old

So far, I have been really enjoying “Room.” The plot and premise are very interesting, and the choice of Jack being the narrator makes the narrative that much more powerful. However, there are quite a few parts where I find myself questioning the likelihood of the narrative. While I enjoy the book, I question quote a few of the events. Mainly, the situations with the skylight. Towards the end of “The Unlying” Jack sees differences in the skylight. On page 86, Jack narrates, “Skylight’s different today. She’s got a black bit like an eye. ‘Look, ma.’ She stares up and grins. ‘It’s a leaf.’ ‘Why?’ ‘The wind must have blown it off a tree onto the glass.’ ‘An actual tree in Outside?’ ‘Yeah. See? That proves it. The whole world is out there.’” At this point Jack still doesn’t really understand the concept of outside. But I still find it weird how he’s never noticed anything over the skylight before. I suppose he may only notice different things on Skylight now that he has a concept of a real Outside, but it still seems a bit weird to me. If I were in Jack’s situation, the skylight would be one of the most interesting parts of the room, as it is always changing. After reading this, I wondered how Ma explained clouds or rain, or the other parts of outside that also occur in TV.  Considering a leaf fell on the skylight close to April, there must have been more in the Fall. There was also the situation with the airplane. Jack narrates, “’I saw it, it was a real airplane only tiny.’ ‘That’s just because it’s far away,’ she says all smiling. ‘I bet if you saw it up close it would actually be huge.’” This distracted me, as if there was an airplane going over now, that must mean that airplanes have a pattern of going over the Skylight. This is the first time he sees a real airplane, and it seems too convenient seeming he just learned about the real world. This airplane situation made me think about the possibility of other things going over skylight. It seems like it would be hard to describe to a child watching the news about the current weather looking up and seeing exactly that, and not understanding it was the same. I suppose Jack could have seen these things before, and assumed like the outside world was just imaginary and everything was there. But, if he had seen leaves on skylight before he wouldn’t have been so excited by the leaf. Another example of the weirdness of the skylight, is just a few pages earlier. Jack talks about the skylight saying, “It’s all black now except Skylight has a dark kind of brightness. Ma says in a city there’s always some light from the streetlights and the lamps in the buildings.”  Either Jack just noticed the light for the first time, which seems weird as the way she describes it, it should happen every night, or he’s always known about the light coming from the city. Always knowing doesn’t make sense because he only just recently learned it was real, and just now learning doesn’t make sense because it has been the same every night, and the way he describes it, the light darkness seems new. These situations make the read a little bit unbelievable, but I am still greatly enjoying the book. These situations could easily be explained by a five year-old not noticing the holes in the picture Ma has painted for Jack over these years. It’s hard to try and see into the head of a five year-old, but that is what makes this novel so powerful. I think these weirdness’s are my own doubting of how a five year-old thinks, but did anyone else find the whole narration a bit unbelievable?