Special Exits

The first thing that caught my attention about this story was the narrative style. This is the first story that didn’t have a sort of master narrator, or blocks of text describing the events as they occur. Instead, the story is entirely left to the characters’ conversations. At the very beginning it looked overwhelming with only the speech bubbles and the illustrations, because normally the blocks of texts act kind of like a buffer for the eyes. On the first few pages it seemed like so much was going on that without the guide of the narrator it would difficult to follow the story and too easy to miss something important. But really, it was just a matter of absorbing the story in a different way. All the characterization and development of the plot happens either through interactions or through the gradual changes in the illustrations, rather than by way of a narrator giving meaning to the events. For example, Rachel’s gradual deterioration. At the beginning of the story she is lively (even if dependent) and very plump, with a taste for things like cookies. And then suddenly I realized that, without any specific mention of it, she had become incredibly thin and frail. All that was provided to warn the reader about what was going came in the form of small and seemingly insignificant scenes, such as when Rachel can barely manage half a bowl of turkey soup. But by the time she gets her sponge bath on pg. 132, the hints at her deterioration suddenly become very obvious. The difference between her naked body here compared to that on pg. 105 is shocking, because it also meant so much time had passed and I hadn’t really accounted for it. The only text that isn’t speech are the small, occasional blurbs in the corners of the top frames, saying things like, “Time tangos on…”, “The next week,” “Time goes on…” etc. Admittedly, I ignored them at first because it hadn’t yet clicked how important time was to the story. But everything started adding up quickly once scenes like Christmas and Sheralee’s visits started recurring. It became clear that this story was about time: how it is simultaneously significant and meaningless when things are ending. The bottom right frame on pg. 79 seemed to encompass this bizarre nature of time. Their positions near the T.V. sort of sum up the state of their lives. They are so tuned out to almost everything that every day blurs into the next, with little consequence. The renovated clocks chime so loudly that both of them constantly hear the time passing, but neither thinks of it in terms of the days ticking away. But they are not ignorant by any means. They just conceive of time in a different measurement, like sitting there and waiting for the next disaster to be dealt: blindness, incontinence, pain so intense walking to the bathroom becomes out of the question, the nursing home. Although there was something heartbreaking in it, it makes sense the way Lars and Rachel cease to take note of the precise passage of weeks and months. If you just have the next day to live for, there isn’t a lot of purpose in keeping track. Laura’s character is interesting because initially it seemed that she was too far removed from her parents’ age and circumstance to really understand them or become part of their story. But she gradually gets just as caught up in their version of time, and is so invested in them that it seems like even she loses track. In the second frame on pg. 151, she looks almost monstrous, like a display of the state of her mind. She is thinking, “I can’t believe she’s gone,” like she doesn’t know what to make of her own frame of reference now that such a big part of it (Rachel) is gone. As the reader, I almost didn’t know what to think either when she died, because of the way her progressive sickness gave the story a sort of direction. That was, of course, because so much had been about Rachel up until her death, and how sick she was, that in comparison Lars seemed stable. But it was really his own sickness at the end that I thought gave their story the most drive, mostly because I was so desperate for him to die so that they could all three be in peace. When the hospice nurses said that he only had a few days to live, time suddenly came back with a force, which can be seen in the way Laura breaks down and says, “I’m going crazy just like the doctor said would happen” (194). When a time limit is put on the remainder of Lars’ life, it is easy to see how that would weigh on Laura- all of a sudden every hour that passes is incredibly important because it might be the last. With Rachel’s death Laura had difficulty wrapping her head around it, whereas readiness makes it easier with Lars.