Write a 2 to 3-paragraph response on the blog on the following:
1. Choose a page or sequence of panels that you find formally interesting.
2. How sympathetic is the protagonist, and how does Chris Ware handle presenting a character who is unlikable at times? Use a specific example.
We have been posed two questions: what is an interesting transition and what makes a unsympathetic character sympathetic? I believe both questions can be answered with a single two-page spread: it begins with a football game and ends in marriage (like every college romance). The story begins with Lint attending the football. Three images of him are aligned on the left hand edge of the left page. The first sentence, “I mean…,” cries with hesitance. The next panel to the right situates him watching a football game with a bunch of “friends,” while the dialogue begins to shift elsewhere, to a girl’s face. That face becomes the most predominant panel (not the largest, but the one that grabs you the most). The bottom of the page shows the description of the conversation between Lint and that girl, but your eye is immediately pulled from one portrait of the girl rightwards across the gutter to a parallel image of the girl, only older. We immediately get the sense that they are aging together before even finishing the story. As we finish the bottom of the left page and move to the right, we are dragged in a different direction. The left hand page, which contains a thought looking forward in time, shifts to a backwards looking thought. Not only is Lint remembering his proposal and her response, he remembers his mother. The scene where he shouts for his mother parallels the scene on the other side where he places his head in his girlfriend’s lap, looking to her for the consolation he once sought in his mother.
ReplyDeleteThis scene makes him extremely sympathetic because for the first time a very obtuse young man experiences an extremely deep emotion, a kind of sense of positive looking forward and nostalgic looking back. He shows a side of himself that is attune to social situations, that is capable of feeling ostracized only to find solace in a single other. He even accepts the name “Jordan” over his childhood name “Jason.” He gives us a real sense that he is growing up (even if he doesn’t end up being much better in every way). I believe these moments will be key in portraying Wong Chin Foo. I believe by showing him as someone who embodies so much farce, we’ll be able to make real positive use of those moments when he shows emotional depth, like when he receives that letter from his son.
I was really intrigued by the page where the art is in the style of how a toddler would perceive the world. It was from that point that I realized what the novel was going to be about: an account on the life of Jordan Wellington Lint. I really liked how the drawings were in their simplest forms that were just detailed enough to distinguish between different objects. And at first I struggled to figure out what Jordan's parents were doing until I realized it was actually violence. I really felt like I was in the shoes of a kid that age, and Chris did a great job at conveying the innocence of a child.
ReplyDeleteDespite being a major dick at times, Jordan is surprisingly really sympathetic. The person that he became was largely due to his abusive upbringing, and we see snippets of his life at its highs (him starting his family), yet most of the time unbelievable lows. I couldn't help but want him to at least get a happy end because of how he never wanted to hurt anyone to begin with. His redeeming quality that he realized how wrong he was in raising his children maxed out my sympathy, and I was pretty depressed with the ending. Chris broke me.
I absolutely loved the last page spread where Jordan/Jason dies. Though sequence throughout most of the book is already quite hard to decipher, by the time he dies sequence has ceased to exist completely. Everything seems to merge into each other; temporal space, physical space, and mental space are no longer enclosed and discrete as Jason (Jordan? I'm just gonna call him Lint.) breaks down. These frantic panels and words, often floating and not enclosed at all or linked to any obvious image, give way to the large, stark image of Lint lying in his hospital bed; a moment of clarity and cognizance before death. I also loved how Lint's physical form begins to disintegrate, just as it formed into existence as he was born. The nature of the small experiential panels and yearning for his mother also mirror the birth, emphasizing the idea that his life is coming full circle. I also loved the repeating phrase that trails off, smaller and smaller, juxtaposed over a blank background; the reader viscerally feels Lint lose his sense of self and the building blocks that created him fall down. (Ware's panels really do look like building blocks, so I think this is an apt metaphor!)
ReplyDeleteI found Lint completely sympathetic. He is by no means a hero, and is deeply deeply flawed. However, we see everything about him; how he grows up, how his thoughts are formed and what they are based on, what makes him tick. We understand him, and empathize with him. Indeed, Ware's sequences at the beginning of the book allow the reader to learn about the world as Lint does. There is something very familiar about Lint's story that I think is relatable for many people. I saw aspects of him throughout his life in myself, my family, and people I know and have heard of. His story is not unusual, and it feels extremely human. Even when his actions are deplorable, he is self aware of those actions, and he has regrets; often his thought processes in various situations seem completely logical and reasonable in that particular situation. I think that those deep regrets are what made Ware's work so powerful. Even if the particular regrets themselves are not personally relatable, they invoke other regrets, and the fear of regrets to come, such as neglecting your family or not finding happiness in a marriage or a job, and dying sad and alone. For me, the work brought about a feeling of inevitability and existential dread that I think is shared by most humans. The fact that the reader can relate to Lint on even this existential dread alone makes him sympathetic.
I found the page where Jordan is becoming a teenager the most interesting. The big bold sentence “I AM JASON” dominates the page followed by a panel of the moon in the dark sky. I found the panel layout to be slightly confusing as I had some trouble figuring out where exactly I had to start—do I start from the panel of the moon or the panel of Jordan looking into the mirror? However, I thought in a way it didn’t matter because Jordan himself is confused too though he pretends to be assertive. I also liked how the panels got smaller when his father caught him dry-humping the ceiling light. It portrayed Jordan’s feeling of unmanliness by being submissive to his father.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I find the protagonist repulsive. His life is driven by sexual desires, and though Ware tries to justify his actions by bringing up his mother’s death, I felt like the reasoning was contrived. The only part that actually made me sympathetic for the protagonist was when he met his first wife Leslie. Because Jordan’s desires in all the other parts were just brutally basic, I felt that when he achieved normalcy in his life even if it was temporary, I felt bad for him to lose all of that. But besides that, he doesn’t really hold any redeeming qualities.
The stream of consciousness sequence that takes place when Jordan (he's still Jordan then) is two or three is particularly striking. Jordan's just beginning to grasp words, and his thought process is still the jumbled non-linear ramble that characterizes young children. Chris Ware, in a feat of writing, steps inside the toddler's head. The big black thought bubble in the middle of the page is borderless and colorful, somewhat confusing, but in the same way that a child's thoughts are. The panels are all fairly large, because Jordan's thoughts and actions are seemingly simplistic, although the thought bubble reveals that they are actually very complex. Without it, Jordan's assault on the other child would just appear catty, not overtly racist. But the short mention of how his daddy doesn't trust black people colors Jordan's actions in a darker light.
ReplyDeleteBecause we follow the complete development of Jordan/Jason Lint literally from start to finish, we, as readers, feel as though we understand all of his motivations. When it is revealed that Lint abused his own children, our first reaction is disgust, but not surprise. Knowing that Jordan watched his father physically assault his mother because we watched it with him and read his thoughts as he tried to understand, we understand Lint even if we don't sympathize with him. Chris Ware intentionally focuses on small, seemingly innocuous moments in Lint's life, because they build up gradually into a picture of a truly despicable man. But since we've known him since he was truly pure and innocent, we see it more as a descent into darkness than a biopic of someone who was truly born evil. Ware also makes readers work to understand what's happening in the story at any given moment, especially when Lint is acting at his most heinous. The sense of victory that comes with figuring out what's happening on the page tempers the rage that would otherwise be incited by Lint's crimes. I don't think we can follow Wong through his entire psychological development, but presenting him as someone who wasn't "born bad" or even just making it more of a puzzle to figure out when he's lying might cast him in a more sympathetic light.
The most jarring sequence for me was definitely the five-page run of when Jason/Jordan broke his son Gabe's collar-bone. The unrelieved red and the quality of the lines (sort of like McCloud's chapter on how lines can show emotions), as well as the way the father is a craggy-faced giant with horrifically detailed hands, creates an experience of intense discomfort for the reader. Overlaid on the sequence is blunt, almost child-like prose describing what's happening. Everything about this sequence is carefully chosen-- the simple rendering of the child's body (similar to Jordan as a baby, but stripped of color), the huge, almost exploding vision of the father's face, the diminution of Gabe's body throughout so he seems minuscule in his father's grasp, the POP with the backwards P so we get a sense of inversion, and the emanata of pain in the last page that drowns out all other figures. The choice to insert this scene late in the book, late enough that there is another child the same age in the house, really brings home how in denial Jordan is. He never acknowledges that his relationships, choices and mistakes are his own fault, and had pretty much succeeded in avoiding the realization that he was an abusive father.
ReplyDeleteJordan Lint is an incredibly dislikable character and hard to sympathize with, even as we see the world through his eyes. He's a character who never learned to feel empathy, or learned to drown out the faint twinges of his consciousness in favor of self-interest and self-pity. That said, the establishment of the unreliable narrator is really well-done. We see the planting of ideas in childhood (dad says black people are bad) and the way that they play out later (rebelling against black teacher, memories after that point literally include only one other black character, who is hinted to be the same teacher). There are more ambiguous seeded points throughout the story, like the image of the sleeping girl in her bra in the car seat which I'm pretty sure is a reference to date rape. Altogether, the story lets us feel that we can see the (depraved, disgusting) whole of the main character's life and understand his motivations, without trying to ultimately redeem him.
I thought the page where Lint meets Charli was really clever. The preceding panels had been showing Lint settling into stable family life with large, uniform panels (contrasting with the scattered look of the rest of the book), with the occasional caption "Jordan Lint." The steady beat of the uniform paneling continues in this page, but when the caption "Jordan Lint" appears again in the 5th panel, the rhythm is broken. The panel is split up, and those panels are split up, breaking the stability and evoking the scattered thoughts of his shitty youth. And over the smallest panels, the heading "Jason Lint" presides over one of his classic sexual fantasies that have reinvaded his life. The next panel is polluted with smaller images, and the next page Ware's scattered style has been reinstated. His is stable no longer.
ReplyDeleteI found it super hard to sympathize with Lint, mostly because he is an empathy-deficient, unapologetic piece of shit. That said, Ware really gives us all the tools to understand him. Although some parts of his past don't appear until late in the book (Lint abusing Gabe), the glimpse we get of his early life is very deliberately connected to his later life. The way Ware repeats images throughout the book gives us a sense of provenance for all the shitty things Lint does. For example, when Lint lashes out at his girlfriend at a frat party, we see that he first sees her as his mother, then his stepmom, then as she is, prompting him to repeat the phrase "You're not my mother!" from earlier in the book. Lint may be a character who does bad things, but he is not a character who does inexplicable things. I don't think we can have that much transparency with Wong Chin Foo's thoughts, but we can certainly make an effort to give his occasionally confusing actions a sense of an underlying rationale.
I think that a really effective sequence is the page where I believe Leslie is telling him she wants a divorce/to end their relationship? (it's the page where the first panel is him at a confession booth, then him praying. The thing about this story is that we're only ever in Lint's head: even when we are shown what's going on we primarily get his thoughts on the matter and his point of view. This page, I think is so effective at showing that his concerns are all he cares about: his perception of what other people are telling him is so small compared to the large ME ME ME on that page. I think it's really effective at getting across how limited his point of view is. It's a great example of how Ware uses changes of scale within a fairly straightforward framework to still tell a very complicated message.
ReplyDeleteI find Lint impossible to like, but I do think that the one thing that Ware does is show how his actions and life have been structured around his situation--he shows that his behaviors are learned behaviors and where he learned them from in a way that even while we don't necessarily need to think that his actions are justifiable, we do see the "why" of his actions. It gives us an understanding of at least where he's coming from even if his reasonings are insufficient to justify his behavior.
As some people have said, the pages that stuck with me most are actually the opening ones, when he's still a toddler. I've never seen such a depiction of what it's like to be that age that feels so truthful. In movies, it's always sort of rational, because it's the adult behind the lens. Pure language is hard too, because how do capture in language what a baby can't express himself? In these pages I feel baby Jordan trying to understand the world around him, putting together all these little images together. We were snippets of what adult language must sound like to him "Jrdn" his mom says). And I can not only hear but feel the way he thinks (mamamamama).
ReplyDeleteThese pages were really essential for me for grounding us in the character of Jordan Lint, and without them, without seeing how innocent he is to begin with, I don't know if I could have identified with as I did. It seems like a lot of people really didn't like him, and at some points (probably no more so than the end, when he still has that persistent sexual fantasy) I felt exasperated with him. But almost throughout, I felt sympathetic to him, or at least deeply sorry for him. I may be sort of biased, because my mom died when I was younger too, and that whole thing really struck a chord with me. Throughout his whole life I could feel that hole in the back of his mind, and even though he sometimes acted really selfish and even cruel, I felt the pain at the root of it. As some people have said, his narrative somehow felt both true and familiar. It reminded me a lot of my dad, who I've seen get older and start grappling with old age, and the existential questions about his life it brings. Our parents always say, "time flies," or "I felt like I was your age just yesterday," and this book kind of showed me how that is. The novel never stops and without really a pause, Jordan gets older and changes with time. He's always the same person, and in the back of my mind there's always baby Jordan, but the world becomes less forgiving to him, less willing to forgive his mistakes because he had messed up childhood, to see him for who he really is.
And I wonder if we read it the same way. If, as time passes, we too become less forgiving and patient with Jordan. When he's an angsty teen, it's easier to be sympathetic to him; he's a kid acting out because he lost his mom. But as he gets older and older, and has kids, there's an impatience on our part: grow up, we think. Or stop feeling sorry for yourself and just take responsibility. In a way, the reader responds to him the same way the world responds to someone as they get older: with less and less patience, less and less willingness to see the roots of his behavior, to forgive his sins.
And because of that I really felt sorry for him for that, because it's something I feel myself grappling with as I get to become an adult. The reader tends to be sympathetic to kids and teens, but what about after that? As we become adults, given all this responsibility yet still influenced whether we know it or not by all those childhood demons, we are poised to make mistakes. At what point will people stop forgiving us for them?
Chris Ware demands that the reader constantly reconstruct the narrative. It is disjointed and at times non-sequitur. I often found myself having trouble following the layout of the page. However that worked with the way he tried to convey his story. I particularly like Lint’s death scene. We see the thoughts and regrets getting more and more frantic. The last spread has mirroring sequences that work to pinch the image of Lint’s fading consciousness. I really like the use of the Ben-Day dots that spread as he is in the final throws of death. It captures the feeling of whiting out. The refrain of ‘am’ or being fading out is a really poignant depiction of death. And I appreciate the artistic flare to continue the ‘am’s on the back cover.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think that Ware managed to make Lint sympathetic. At most, Lint is pathetic. He gives us these vignettes that provide us the tools to understand Lint’s psychology. We can see that his relationship with his father and the death’s of his mother and best friend drive him to the brink. However many of these small stories highlight Lint’s inability to take responsibility for himself. When he gets caught for embezzlement, Lint blames his father. The reader is inclined to blame Dick Lint as well because the story is told from Jordan’s point of view. Lint isn’t exactly an unreliable narrator; he simply omits certain details and emphasizes others. Quite frequently the story is told in such a fractured way that it is hard to make sense of it. For example, I only have a vague sense of what happened with the girl in the car (she is one of the final regrets that he struggles with as he dies).
Ware constructs a character that is broken down at an early age, yet fails to grasp every offer of redemption. Each of these failures only make him more bitter. The downward cycle that Lint is caught in is tragic, but it does not absolve him. To Ware’s credit I did not leave the book hating Lint. I understand Lint and can appreciate his complexity. However, faint disgust/pity ≠ sympathy.