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The story of Room is one of escape, of breaking past confinement to reach freedom. By the chapter 'After,' it may seem that we have reached that point, as Ma and Jack have broken out of Room, but still they are not truly free. One of the first things that constrains Ma and Jack still is their weakened immune systems, due to being totally isolated from the outside world and outside illnesses. This impacts Ma and Jack in slightly different ways. Ma knows and understands the situation and seems to consider more an inconvenience than anything. Jack, on the other hand, has been raised to be pretty much terrified of germs, and early on things the scrape on his knee and his dog-bitten finger are going to be the death of him. Even though Jack has left Room, he still brings it with him. For example, his vocabulary. Even though Jack is a remarkably literate five-year-old, the outside world still has an impossible array of things he does not have words for, so he tries to describe the...

Despite the fact that A Lesson Before Dying is about a boy in a jail cell who physically cannot go anywhere, it is still very much a journey. For Grant, there is still a nontrivial physical journey: around 13 miles to Bayonne. However, this rapidly becomes routine for Grant, not remotely heroic. Instead, the journey is a mental and emotional one, that attempts to reach out to Jefferson and inspire him. At the very beginning, Grant does not attend the courtroom with his Aunt and Miss Emma, instead choosing to distance himself because he already knows exactly what will happen. The first ordeal therefore becomes merely pushing Grant past his attempts to isolate himself from the issue. In the jail cell, there are more than physical walls that separate Jefferson from the rest of the world. Jefferson is silent, seemingly emotionless and ignoring his visitors. He then turns mocking, seeming not to recognize Grant, perhaps trying to drive away his visitors rather than experience/cause the ...