Jamrach's Menagerie Paper

Jamrach's Menagerie Paper

In Jamrach's Menagerie Carol Birch introduces the world to the reader through the exploring of the ideas of whole man's life being a figurative cage, idea of illusiveness of freedom, exploring the meaning of storytelling: she states that reality and experience are not being understood as fixed or certain, but are based on each man's own perception and previous expectations.

One's understanding of reality, and therefore, freedom is the result of perception, not fact. The motif of being put from one "cage" to another can be found throught the novel: from Jaffy's miserable living in Bermondsey to Jamrach's Menagerie, to being locked at night in the shop, sailing on the ship, drifting on the boat, and then to the desperation of living trying to get over the events of the shipwreck. He is also always surrounded by cages in some way: menagerie's enclosures, dragon's prison within the ship and bird cages throughout the story, which makes this idea very obtrusive. What is noticeable, that Jaffy gets himself nearly in all of this extents by his own free will: in that way Birch seems to show that when he is young and unexperienced (having no experience of shipwreck) he is eager to explore everything new and enlarge the scope of his "cage". He feels and provides himself with that experience when shifting the "cages" and comparing them: "The tiger had opened magical doors"(18) is how Jaffy feels after having and having compared a single raspberry puff to his previous life and, probably, foreseeing more of this new and unknown within which the tiger accident had put him. As long as Jaffy is reaching for new experiences and places, under the impression of being given and opportunity to do so working at Jamrach's , opening the world, he is free and his freedom grows, though it might not seem to be. But as soon as he gets stuck on the boat drifting on the open ocean he is locked there and his freedom vanishes as well as the desire to explore. It is really ironical from the point of view of freedom - being out on the open ocean, which usually symbolizes freedom, not able to do anything, but just lay and die slowly amidst the other dying: freedom becomes an illusion for him.

Storytelling acts as a means to organize or make up ideas about reality and freedom, which are based on perception. One needs to believe in something, make something seem stable and eternal, or just it up, as man always tends to put everything in some sort of system which seems legitimate from the point of view of his experience as it offers comfort in the form of world becoming more understandable and accustomed to their perception of the world. But sometimes, either in the moments of tense or at some extreme points people start to rely on their made up story too strongly for there is nothing else to rely on and can