ABSTRACT
By resisting his own destiny as deeply traumatic and violent, Jack becomes a "willful child", in Sarah Ahmed's sense of the term in her work, Willful Subjects—that is, as a child with the capacity to fight against exacerbated suffering and vulnerability. In Room, Jack, the child protagonist, is enabled to transform his doomed tragic destiny by displaying affective attachments to inanimate objects as well as by using great doses of imagination and creativity. Jack's personification of every object in Room is but a sign of his ceaseless attempts to create intimate bonds and attachments to all those things as if they were empathic listeners. While it could be argued that children usually have an affinity for the world of objects and a keenness to invent, play, and transform them into treasures, Jack's investment of positive affects such as love, tenderness, and care into his surrounding objects mostly takes place while he is entrapped in Room.
