Ma is explaining what she means by calling Jack "the dead spit of me," but she's also doing a good job of explaining DNA and genetics on a level that a five-year-old can understand.

Technically, Old Nick is family. He's Jack's dad. And it's really weird when he acts like a dad, albeit a really terrible, horrible, no-good, bad dad. He doesn't know how old Jack is, or remember his birthday, but he still wants to bring him a present.

And that means that Ma has been inside an 11x11 room for eight years. It's all Jack knows, and he's small, so it's not that strange for him, but Ma's claustrophobia must be out of control.

Jack isn't just confined in Room, he's sometimes confined in a Wardrobe within Room. That's double confinement. Just as parents want to protect their kids from things in the outside world, Ma has to find a way to protect Jack even though their "world" is only 121 square feet.

Jack thinks this is just another activity he and Ma do, like Catch or Track. He doesn't quite understand why they sit silently afterwards. What they're doing is screaming for help. Ma hopes someone will hear them and let them out of Room.

For Ma, it would be nice to mix up the furniture arrangement inside Room. That's about all she can do to keep it fresh. But Jack enjoys the way everything stays the same, so she doesn't do it; she wants to keep him comfortable.

Although Jack can pick up on the change in Ma's tone of voice, he doesn't understand why she sounds this way. She's been trapped inside Room for eight years, with nowhere else to go. Not a day goes by without her wishing she was out of there.

Mouse is the first living thing from Outside Room that Jack has ever seen, and he regards it like he regards everything: with wide-eyed child-like reverence.

Once Jack finds himself Outside Room, he is kind of like Meltedy Spoon… he's not the same as anyone else. Although a lot of people like him because of his differences, they also want to make him a part of society. But taking Room out of Jack would be like unmelting the spoon.

Ma tries to explain the way society works, with all its weird exceptions, even though Jack's trapped inside Room. She wants to teach him good morals —like don't hit people—but she also wants him to understand that sometimes people do hit people, and in certain contexts, it's okay. How can anyone keep all these rules straight?

Ma has to explain almost everything to Jack. He's only five. She has a great ability to explain the idioms that people use all the time without thinking. And she has incredible patience since she's able to define all of these things for her son so many times a day.

Ma uses TV mostly to educate Jack, watching educational shows like Dora and playing the Parrot game—in which Jack repeats back what people say—to build his vocabulary. She limits the use of TV, though, because most TV isn't educational at all, especially not to a five-year-old.

Ma is pretty patient, but Jack is patient, too. Even at a young age, he realizes that he sometimes forgets things, but this doesn't frustrate him. He just knows he has to be reminded of things, and everything will be okay.

This is a pretty profound line from a five-year-old. Most kids don't learn to take care of their things for a very, very long time. Jack has learned this lesson pretty early.

Revealing to Jack that TV is kind of real opens up a whole new world for Jack to learn about. This revelation changes Jack's entire world, making him think about everything in a whole new way.

Ma and Jack like to play vocabulary games. It may seem like a childish thing to do, but it actually relies on great vocabulary skills. It shows that Jack knows a bunch of synonyms, and also that he understands that "huge" and "enormous" can be combined into one even bigger word.

Jack might understand a lot of words, but being trapped inside Room limits his ability to understand some of them. He thinks that he and Ma are the only "real" people and that everyone else, even the humans, inside the television are not real. It takes him a while to grasp this concept.

Because Jack only understands things (and people) he has seen in person, and because all his other knowledge comes from TV, he uses the word "TV" to mean "fantasy" or "imaginary." To Jack, anything that he hasn't laid his hands on is imaginary—even bunnies.

This is a pretty good definition of sarcasm, and it's impressive that five-year-old Jack not only understands what sarcasm is, but can pick up when someone is using it. That's more than a lot of adults are able to manage.

It's difficult to tell these two things apart. You can't really pretend without lying, and you can't really lie without pretending it's true. In Jack's mind, they're two distinct concepts. He doesn't understand that to an outside person, like Ma, they look like the same thing sometimes.