Response to Daytripper
Daytripper is one of my all time favorite graphic novels. It resonated with me so much and I found the story very compelling. The use of obituaries and the narrative decision to have Bras die for a symbol of a significant change in his life/the death of the old him. I don’t think I can even explain into words how much I love every aspect of this graphic novel from its art to its characters. If I touched on everything,this blog post would quickly turn into a numbered page analysis and reaction. So, I’ll focus on one of my favorite chapters- the one where Bras seeks out Jorge and is desperate to find him. This chapter was one of the most heartbreaking and emotional in my opinion, and a part of it comes from knowing how close their friendship was and what had happened to it and how much Jorge had changed from the beginning to his end.
It had been previously established that Jorge was the closest friend that Bras had, and he would do anything to see him again and help him because that’s what friends are supposed to do.
While I have a number of theories, I’m not entirely sure how much of the ending of the chapter was symbolic and how much was literal. I believe that Jorge did die, both truly and in a sense that the Jorge that Bras knew was dead. It’s tragic and it’s true that friends do drift apart and those that you have called friends in the past can become completely different people. It’s heartbreaking and it can even kill you for a short time emotionally (of course, Daytripper in this chapter showed Jorge directly murder Bras). It’s especially tragic seeing the flashbacks of the early days of their friendship and how different that Jorge was from the man we see at the end of the chapter. But it’s also a possibility that Bras never even travelled in the first place or that he never found Jorge and gave up after a fruitless search and disheartening realization that an important person in his life would never be a part of it every again. Or, maybe he did find Jorge, but it was his best friend’s body and they never had a conversation leading up to the death. Daytripper tends to be vague in what actually happened and what didn’t when the end of the chapter is close to being reached. The magical realism, or whatever the right term for it is, was something of Daytripper that I loved so much about the graphic novel.
It had been previously established that Jorge was the closest friend that Bras had, and he would do anything to see him again and help him because that’s what friends are supposed to do.
While I have a number of theories, I’m not entirely sure how much of the ending of the chapter was symbolic and how much was literal. I believe that Jorge did die, both truly and in a sense that the Jorge that Bras knew was dead. It’s tragic and it’s true that friends do drift apart and those that you have called friends in the past can become completely different people. It’s heartbreaking and it can even kill you for a short time emotionally (of course, Daytripper in this chapter showed Jorge directly murder Bras). It’s especially tragic seeing the flashbacks of the early days of their friendship and how different that Jorge was from the man we see at the end of the chapter. But it’s also a possibility that Bras never even travelled in the first place or that he never found Jorge and gave up after a fruitless search and disheartening realization that an important person in his life would never be a part of it every again. Or, maybe he did find Jorge, but it was his best friend’s body and they never had a conversation leading up to the death. Daytripper tends to be vague in what actually happened and what didn’t when the end of the chapter is close to being reached. The magical realism, or whatever the right term for it is, was something of Daytripper that I loved so much about the graphic novel.
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