Other Voices, Other Rooms
As one reads Truman Capote’s, Other Voices, Other Rooms, the themes in the book become very evident. Isolation, for example, plays a large role in the novel’s protagonist’s life. Joel Knox Harrison was orphaned as a boy and is sent away to live with a family who are semi-related to him. He feels isolation both by blood, but also geographically; his new home is in the middle of nowhere which is in stark comparison to his former home of New Orleans. Loneliness seeps into every corner of his life, as he spends the rest of the novel wanting to be loved.
Written in what can be assumed is Southern Gothic form, the books theme also sees the characters struggle with eternity, and their own mortality. Essentially, it contains death, and this forces the characters to reconcile with the idea of the death of another, or their own. Joel’s mother, for instance, is the first to die. Joel struggles with this, and again struggles with mortality when a servant at Skully’s Landing, where he is sent after being orphaned, dies as well. Everybody around Joel seems to die, which gives the reader the sense that there is no point in hoping for a future for Joel. Here, we are lead to the central idea of the novel.
The central idea of Other Voices, Other Rooms, revolves around Joel’s coming of age. Whether he has a future or not is irrelevant. He is thirteen when the death, decay, and emotional torture of the book takes place, and the point is to see him go through it. His parents are gone, he has been uprooted from everything he knows and isolated. These are themes, yes, but the central idea is what can happen when a person coming of age deals with such extreme themes at this age. He passes between childhood and adulthood, a crucial age for any person, carrying a changing voice and raging hormones along the way. We see him handle the biology of growing, alongside the emotion of mortality, which will force the reader to close the book and realize, despite their biological predispositions that may make them feel so alive on any given day, they are alone and will die too.
