The attribute of
depression that is very prevalent in our culture now gives rise to many
different views towards life and how we should live it. In Ware’s Jimmy
Corrigan, we are given one more view on that emotion. Ware seems to take a more satirical or
comical approach to human loneliness and he paints the main character as
someone to be pitied and to almost bring about a chuckle at how mundane his
life seems. However by using the general
instructions section on the cover, we can see that Ware also wants to apply
meaning to many of the frames he includes.
Something that stands out to me is what Ware says in
the Role section of the instructions about expectations or human feeling. He describes how for many people a kind of
trap of despair has caught a hold of them and it affects how we go about our
days, either rendering our actions hollow or forcing us to break through a
ceiling of sorts. Ware describes this situation
of bleakness by saying,
“There are moments – indeed, das, weeks, or even
years on end – in some people’s lives where there is a palpable sense that all
activity is valueless. Perhaps waking up
one hopeful, sunny morning, we feel the innocent child within us reanimate, a
feeling only to be shortly dispelled by the masked lie of adulthood staring back
at us in the bathroom mirror. Or perhaps
someone has just let us know that we were no, after all, the life companion
that they thought we were, and asked that we please not visit, or telephone, or
share their sheets anymore,…”
He is referring to a
crushing sense of emptiness that so many people feel that their life has not
panned out in any way close to what we wanted and that possibly some things
that we hold on to for stability are not permanent, especially people
themselves. We could spend much of our
lives trusting someone or some activity only to have the rug pulled out from
under our feet and see that the person was not what we thought they were. This can work as the depressing event itself
or something to help break through that ceiling and move away from the darkened
thought process of worthlessness.
Ware makes it interesting to apply this concept to a
set of moments in the beginning of the book and how Jimmy experiences these
feelings. As a child he idolizes a
superhero from a TV show, and upon seeing the actor at a car show he reacts
with typical enthusiasm. In a consequent
frame the man after leaving the mother’s bedroom early in the morning, gives
Jimmy a mask to wear, as if to say, “You can be my sidekick!” Jimmy of course is too young to understand
what went on during the night, and so he still is filled with happiness at his
good fortune. Ware uses these frames to
set up the illusion of Jimmy’s happiness as a child, because we are aware that
the man certainly was of more questionable character than Jimmy could see and
that his enthusiasm and trust are misplaced.
Once we reach the images of Jimmy later in life, we see how despondent
and beaten down he is and we know now that he has reached that stage of life
that he feels like he has no value. He
sees the world for what it is, cold and uncaring and moving at a pace he doesn’t
seem to keep up with. Then there is the
image of the superhero actor jumping off the roof to his demise. Here Ware is using the suicide as a symbol
for the event in Jimmy’s life that shows him he needs to take action. He has reached that ceiling and been pushed
through it by seeing his childhood idol, something that brought him so much joy
as a small boy, jump to his death and so end Jimmy’s stagnated life cycle. Jimmy sees that the world will never be what
it was supposed to be in his childhood mind and he has to move on.
Ware includes the general instructions in the cover
to give us a window into what Jimmy could be thinking. Since many of the frames lack words, Ware
directs us to make assumptions about the main character’s thoughts and
feelings, and with those assumptions we can piece together why he seems to be stuck
in his life. He is suffering from the
illusion of what he thought life would be as told by the Super-man, and now
that his idol’s character is revealed maybe Jimmy can move on.
Your argument is interesting. It could be clarified at the start and more focused throughout. One problem here is that you summarize too much (the long quotation that you don’t really use also stands out), and you only slowly get around to the part of your thinking that moves beyond summarization into a genuine idea.
ReplyDeleteFor a while it seems like you’re only really saying that JC the character is depressed, and that JC the book is partially about depression. That’s dangerously close to being obvious, of course. The interesting material is your claim that the introduction is there to help us (in my words, not yours) understand Jimmy’s inner life.
That’s actually an excellent idea and an excellent approach. But rather than just stating that, which is basically what you do here, for this essay to work you need to *use* that idea. So if we need to understand Jimmy’s inner life & thoughts through the introduction, the obvious thing to do is to pick some passage in the book (a page? a few panels?) and show in detail how we can develop our understanding of him by filtering something about those particular panels through the lens of the introduction. If you could do that well, that would make for a very interesting revision.