The+title+explained

The title of the book is "Jacob's Room." I think that I now know what the title means. Jacob's rooms are places where he goes after a stressful or distressing event to experience solitude. In the beginning of the book, after the sheep skull incident, where did he go? To his room. After he saw his promiscuous girlfriend with another guy, where did he go and what did he do? He went to his room, smoked, and forgot about the whole thing.

We know that eventually the conflict will occur, and Jacob will witness the horrors of World War I, losing his love of the classics. I think, therefore, that the "room" the title refers to will be his place of solitude in which he will recover. What will this room be? I think it will be a woman, specifically, Clara Durrant. After all, he "honoured [her] the most" (96). However, we do not know what effect Sandra will have on Jacob. 1201140124

A room can be a place of refuge, or it can just be a place where one keeps all one's stuff. And people's stuff speak wonders about the people themselves. Jacob's room is where the novel ends. It is an empty shell without him. Letters strewn everywhere (which are basically like pictures of his life). Jacob, while he was alive in the book, was hard enough to figure out, and his room is sort of like his legacy. I suppose that this could apply to people being places of refuge as well (as JHe mentioned) because Jacob also left marks on people he knew and people who knew him. Parts of them are empty shells without him, as we see in the cases of Bonamy and Mrs. Flanders.

And when I say knew, I mean to an extent, because it has been made clear that a person can only be known to an extent. Jacob's room provides insights into Jacob that not even Bonamy or Mrs. Flanders had. A room doesn't keep secrets well without its inhabitant. With that said, what does Jacob's empty room spill to us in that single page? Well, there's that wicker chair line that is repeated from page 27: "Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there." (138) This really can be taken in many ways. When we interpreted it in class, Br. Tom said it was eerie, but I thought it completely normal. Things shift and things creak all the time in my house, and my house isn't eerie at all. Without its owner, the room can be misleading as well. What else can we draw about Jacob's room, or rooms in general?1201303332