Journal entry 5: Stitches

In the final segment of this book, it parallels by rewinding back to Davids childhood in the form of a dream. He is afraid of the outside world and in the dream he is the only resident in his home. I feel this is a reflection on the feeling of loneliness he felt as a child due to the distance between him and his family members along with the lack of healthy communication between the members of his family.
In his dream, he sees his mother sweeping a path for him to the insane asylum where his grandmother is. This is intended to be his fate in the way he feels others see it but he makes the choice not to follow this path. This brings up the whole concept of fate vs. free will. David has been thrown enough obstacles to the point where if he were to go down this path it would not be surprising or inappropriate in many peoples eyes. His mother doesn't love him, he was like a lab rat during his childhood, he had cancer, he lost his ability to speak and he had a dysfunctional relationship with the members of his family. But much like Oedipus, he choses the path he wants to go down, and in this case it means not letting his environment and circumstances he grew up with define him as a person.

Journal entry 4: Stitches

In this segment of the book, we see the reoccurrence of the Alice in Wonderland theme previously referenced on pg. 56 when he talks about falling in love with Alice and then again on pg. 62+63 he creates an escape by jumping "into the rabbit hole" of one of his drawings. Its his way of escaping his real world problems. Jumping back to this segment we see his therapist in the form of the white rabbit. He is coming face to face with his problems and fears in life and his therapist is there for his validation. On pg. 263 the therapist/rabbit says " you've been living in a world of nonsense, David. No one had been telling you the truth about anything. But I am going to tell you the truth". The truth here is the explanation for why his childhood was the way it was, and he puts it simply as " your mother doesn't love you". (255) David coming to terms with this allowed him to pull himself together while the rest of his family fell apart which was very important. I wonder if Davids mothers lack of love for David is really spelled out in the beginning to us with how she was born with her heart on the wrong side, as if it were to be inevitable.

Images and frames are really played with when Davids father confesses to him about giving him cancer. On 287 the entire page is filled with His dads horrified face confessing " I GAVE YOU CANCER" and then the very next page is just Davids blank stare reaction. The following page we see filled with the scene of his father standing behind the x-ray machine with three small rectangular frames overlapping it on the top showing Davids eyes. The next page is a switch to David as a baby strapped down and having the x-rays taken, its the other side of the scene pictured with his dad previously and now we see the three overlapping images on the bottom of the page, nearly identical to the ones on the front page except now it shows the eyes of david as a small child/baby. In the final page of this scene, we see again the page having one large frame with David as a baby overlapping with David in the present. Through these frames and imaging it takes us in and out of the process of the flashback David is having and bringing them together. While examining it, I picture it much like in Minority Report when we see the pre-cogs going in and out of a vision, like clarification.

Journal entry 3: Stitches

We see a great contrast in this segment of the book when looking at the different sides of David's mother. On page 175 she gives in and brings David his contraband "adult literature". She figures at this point he is dead anyways so what difference would it make? But later on she reverts back to her old ways and ends up taking back the book once she realizes he is going to live. After a near death experience she moves on in a second, she doesn't value him any more after that than she did before which I think shows a lot about her character. From this I cant help but wonder, how much does she really love her son? Does she struggle to express emotion or is her son mainly just an inconvenience to her?
David is faced with an identity crisis after his surgery when he loses ability to speak. His mother states it as "The fact that you now have no voice will define you from here on in, like your fingerprints, the color of your eyes, your name."(186). Here his identity is being defined for him, by his doctors who made his silence no longer a choice, as well as his own mother. We see him struggle with this newly found "fate" he has been presented with on page 190 and 191 where he comes face to face with his stitches and what the doctors had done to him. " Surely this is not me. No friend it surely is". David does not want to accept this as his new identity regardless of how other people are trying to construct it. And why should he trust other people and their construction of his identity when they lied to him about having cancer.

Journal entry 2: Stitches

In this segment of the graphic novel, for a brief scene we see a contrasting switch in the way that Davids' mother carries herself while around Mrs. Dillon at the bridge club event. We can see her eyes through her glasses for the first time and speaks in a sing-songy tone, unlike the previous barking and door slamming seen previously. It is a different side to her that seems to only come out when she's in the presence  of Mrs. Dillon. My question to this is, is it really Mrs. Dillon who has this irresistible charm to everyone who she meets, similar to a Marilyn Monroe affect, or is Davids' mothers admiration that of something a little greater? We see David fawn over her, but he is an eleven year old boy and his mother is not.
The imagery on page 146 and 147 leads me back to my investigation of the relationship between David and the fetus from the hospital. The series of images starts out very shadowy and we see that the frames view points start out in a slightly low angle shot, becoming more close up in each frame. David is alone technically and he is facing himself in the mirror, looking more into himself rather than at himself. We see an over the shoulder shot of David looking at himself in the mirror, and the reflection is shadowed darker than david himself. To this it can be inferred that David sees this darker side of himself, and at the same time he's trying  to find himself. As he looks at the growth on his neck more and more he begins to imagine the same fetus from before growing inside of it. No longer is it chasing him, it is inside of him, it is a part of him. The fetus is very shady and dark and elusive as well and I believe it is because David is struggling to understand himself and who he is, is he like this dark, trapped, growing fetus? Who is he? These images can be read as a great demonstration of the conflict of self vs. self. The images are not very detailed and the just focus mainly on david and this fetus with little background.

Journal Entry 1 :Stitches

In this section of the graphic novel Stitches, there is a lot of repetition in reference to language. Page 15, "Mama had her little cough...once or twice, some quiet sobbing, out of sight... or the slamming of cupboard doors. That was her language.(17) " " Dad, home from work, went down to the basement and thumped a punching bag. That was his language.-my brother, Ted, beat on his drum.(19)" "Getting sick, That was my language.". All of these "languages" are these peoples ways of expressing themselves wordlessly, I would also argue that David uses drawing as a language as another way of expressing himself. This family is not the type of family that talks openly about their emotions so they have to all channel their feelings in a different way that makes them all seem more distant and independent from one another because of it. A question that struck me while reading this segment regards to the scene with all of the fetuses (38). We see a lot of imagery of this exchange in eye contact between the two of him and I wonder if  David sees himself as being like the fetus, trapped in this jar, small and helpless. This leads me into my topic I wanted to focus on for this segment regarding words, or in this case:lack there of. The whole segment goes seven pages without any text, though text is not needed. There are a lot of parallel shots going between David and the fetus, shots that look nearly identical. One we see is a super close up of the eye of David next to another shot with the eye of the fetus. It is as if they are looking at each other and not being so different from one another. This is done again on the next page (40) the top right and left frames are identical in their positioning of the subjects to that of the bottom frames. The only difference is really that David is physically bigger and yet he is the one who is being "chased" by the fetus. What is he afraid of? The fetus does look a bit creepy and evil and the silence between the two of them is fantastic in that it almost feels like the moment is more intimate that David is feeling and this silent fear of his is very powerful.