52 pages • 1-hour read
Jacob's Room
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Symbols & Motifs
Rooms
During the course of the novel, Jacob lives in his family home, his student accommodation, and a small apartment in London. These permanent homes become reflections of his character, another attempt by the narrator to investigate the individual identity of the protagonist. This technique builds on the Modernist principle of the objective correlative. The objective correlative is a literary device referring to a set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events that imply or represent certain feelings. The objects in Jacob’s private space thus become reflections of his emotional state and offer inconclusive hints about his identity. As such, rooms become important symbols of The Ineffability of Individual Identity in the text.
Jacob’s private life is often hidden from the narrative. On the occasions when he does allow someone inside, such as Florinda, the narrator often remains outside. The narrator sometimes only picks up his story when he is in a public place or surrounded by other people. As such, sections of the narrative also end with Jacob returning to his student accommodation or his apartment, reinforcing the sense that his true self and inner state remain elusive and unknowable to others. Fanny, for example, lingers in the street and passes by his window. She knows that she cannot access Jacob’s rooms, as these are hidden away from the world, which represents her exclusion from Jacob’s emotional life.
The culmination of this symbolism is the final chapter. After Jacob dies in World War I, Bonamy and Betty enter Jacob’s room. The room is in a state of disarray, with “everything just as it was” (178). The room does not offer them a sense of closure or greater insights into who Jacob was. Instead, the room offers nothing but confusion and frustration. The chapter is the shortest because, in effect, Bonamy and Betty are confronted with Jacob’s fundamental unknowability. Betty does not even know what to do with his shoes; her confusion over such a seemingly mundane decision reflects her disorientation and grief, with Jacob’s room now reminding her of his permanent absence and elusiveness instead of enabling her to feel closer to him.
Light
Light functions as an important motif in the text. In Chapter 1 of Jacob’s Room, Betty puts her children to bed. As she prepares to retire, she notices that she has not extinguished her lamp. The light blazes out through the window, illuminating the world outside. It shines on the “child’s green bucket” (7) and the other objects that defined the family’s day on the beach. As she looks out across the bay, Betty sees other lights in other houses. They seem to “wink and quiver” (8) in the fury of the storm. These lights shine from houses that are distant and unknowable, a contrast to the light from within Betty’s own familiar holiday home. The contrast between Betty’s light and the light from the distant houses symbolizes the novel’s theme of The Ineffability of Individual Identity: She cannot know those lights, just as they cannot know hers.
Later in the novel, light comes to symbolize Jacob’s dawning realization of the atomization of the society he inhabits. While at university, he often leaves the well-lit parties where students chat and flirt with one another. Jacob is a lonely figure as he walks back across the dark campus, with the lack of light surrounding him a symbolic reminder of the darkness that obfuscates his character. The most telling moment is when he sees Florinda out with another man. Jacob is not struck by an understanding of Florinda, so much as he is “drenched” (93) by a sudden understanding of the unknowability of others. The light—coming from an arc lamp above him—isolates Jacob in this moment of terrible realization that he fails to comprehend others just as much as they fail to comprehend him.
One of the most significant moments in Jacob’s life takes place in moonlight. Jacob’s moonlit walk through the Acropolis with Sandra is a moment that, according to Sandra herself, “mattered for ever” (170). However, this moment between the two lovers occurs away from the glare of the narrative light. It is revealed only in echoes, such as Jacob’s memories, his melancholy, and his letters from Sandra. Tellingly, the moment does not happen in the light of the day, illustrating how—in a narrative sense—the moment will be told only through refraction, once more reinforcing how sometimes the most important aspects of someone’s life and identity remain unknowable by others.
Ruins
Ruins are another key symbol in the text, invoking Navigating Social Norms in a Changing World and foreshadowing the dramatic changes Jacob’s own society is about to undergo during and after World War I. Jacob has a longstanding fascination with ruins. As a man who feels alienated from his contemporary society, he finds comfort in the ruined remains of long-dead civilizations. Near to his childhood home is a Roman fortress; once an outpost of a conquering civilization, the fortress is now reduced to ruins. It lingers on as a legacy of a lost time, a reminder to Jacob that the human experience has changed immeasurably over time.
For Betty, the ruins have a different meaning. She has been bringing her children to the fortress at the top of Dod’s Hill for many years. As such, a visit to the fortress can quell her anxiety in time of mounting military tension. Rather than the ancient past, the fortress—for Betty—is a symbol of her children’s early years. The years gone by are marked by the objects she and her boys left behind among the ruins. The garnet broach lost by Mrs. Jarvis joins Betty’s darning needles and other treasures among the “Roman skeletons” (133). These objects are joined to the fortress as objects that signify the past and that become lost to time, to be dug up and remembered many years from now.
While Jacob may have been raised in close proximity to Roman ruins, his heart has always belonged to Ancient Greek culture. Jacob fetishizes the culture of Ancient Greece, deluding himself with youthful naivety that he and his friends may actually be the only people in the world who have realized “what the Greeks really meant” (74). This motivates Jacob’s journey to Greece to visit the ruins such as the Acropolis. He wants to find meaning among the ruins of a culture he has viewed from afar. The trip is a symbolic journey of learning, but one in which Jacob learns more about himself than about Ancient Greece. His affair with Sandra takes place among the ruins, granting them a temporary reprieve from the usual social restrictions back home in Edwardian England. However, the fact that Jacob travels so far only to spend time in the company of a fellow English person, rather than actually engage with the culture he supposedly reveres, shows how little Jacob actually understands himself. Their affair, which takes place just before the outbreak of the war that will kill Jacob, also foreshadows how the society they grew up in will soon be reduced to ruins as well.
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