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A Summary Of David In Stitches

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Reality is an external terrain for our minds and bodies, but the imagination is an internal escape for our thoughts and reasoning. It is a endless realm that can only be controlled by ourselves, and an area for us to freely think about the outside world and create an entirely new reality inside of us. This mental reality is a place that we can escape when we are unable to connect in the real world or the real world becomes too hard to bear just as it was for David in Stitches: A Memoir by David Small. Within a comic medium, David is able to find an escape during the darkest periods of his childhood through an alternative reality by drawing and imagining himself inside the magical world of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. While …show more content…

Perhaps one of the most significant references to the book, a parallel is made between the White Rabbit who leads Alice out of her own world, and into another lines up with David’s therapist helping David out of his dismal reality that he has grown up in. The therapist and the White Rabbit have morphed together because through this character David found an escape. This same imaginative character was a character that came from imagination, and ultimately helped David come face to face to the fact that his own mother did not love him (Davidson). In every scene David has in therapy, the therapist is always portrayed as the White Rabbit. The therapist becomes like a parent figure for him as they talk about David’s thoughts and troubles (268-269). David finds solace within the therapist. During his sessions, his therapist explores David’s dreams with him. Imagination plays a big factor in David’s dreams. In one dream, David has imagined himself a lonely bat calling out for his mama on a cold rainy day (196-197). As he continues to search for his mama, he spots something against a wall that may be his mother. He grabs what in reality is an umbrella and as he opens it up expecting to provide protection, the umbrella has holes all over it. This dream manifests the truth about his relationship with his neglectful mother. Even when he wasn’t awake. While a bat and an umbrella may not have much in common, it is through David’s imagination that David begins to makes connections with his

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These two elements show both the beginning and the end of David’s struggle with mental illness, as well as how influential and symbolic Alice in Wonderland was to David Small. Shortly after the surgery where the doctors had to remove David’s vocal cord, David has a strange dream (pp. 196-200) about a bat in the rain looking for an umbrella. The bat is trying to find his mother, which apparently is an umbrella, as well as a very damaged and overall useless umbrella on that note. The dream is symbolic for two upcoming elements in the book, the abrupt storm that is David’s mental illness, and the worthless umbrella that is David’s mother. The events proceeding are more than enough evidence toward my claim: David’s family hiding the truth about his surgery from him

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Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, illustrates and depicts her unique upbringing. Her life story is told through her own illustrations, showing her internal conflict with who she is, as well as struggling to understand her father’s death. This unconventional way Bechdel chose to express her story positively affects the reader's comprehension of the novel. Being able to clearly see the situations creates more feelings of empathy towards the characters, and deeper connections are made. Reading about a situation, and actually seeing it are two very different things.

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The book begins with a glimpse into David’s last encounter with his mother before he is taken into protective custody. While jumping out of his mother’s car as she dropped him off at school, his mother instructed David to lie about the origins of the bruises and scars that were scattered about his body due to his mother’s vicious beatings and punishments. The harsh disciplinary measures which his mother imposed on him led David to become the outcast of his school. His hygiene was less than minimal, and his clothes were ragged and filthy. These characteristics of David stood out to his school’s nurse, who had begun keeping track of David’s bruises and scars.

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He falls into a sort of fantasy when he feels the comfort of the warm air, but is snapped back to reality by the cold wind from outside. He will later become regretful that he ignored the warm air, the symbol for his wife, and instead listened to the window and the air

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In the beginning of the story, David was a timid, quiet boy who would have preferred to have stayed home with his mom in Chicago. “‘I don't want to sleep in a tent.’ He said, and his voice broke with the simple honesty of it, and his eyes glazed”(Pg 416) He says he doesn't want to sleep in a tent and begins to break down almost.

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With literature, we mentally escape our reality to enter another, which depends on whom or what the story is based or talking

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This shows the change David has made with his views and choices. In the beginning of the book, David wished for extra arms as a harmless joke only to realize that making that joke costed him and got beat by his father. David then kept quiet as he didn’t want to express his own feelings due to trauma he has suffered. By the end of the book, David runs away with his friends in protest to his father’s rules and to express who he truly is. From the beginning of the book to the end, David has shown examples of him changing who he is as a person for the better.

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Baldwin writes, “I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm” (Baldwin 42). The diction in this sentence shows the readers how guilty David feels as he describes his love for Giovanni, a frenchman that he meets and falls in love with, as ferocious excitement and a bursting storm. David says that he couldn’t even pretend to be sorry that Hella, his fiancée, was off in Spain. Even though he wishes he was upset that she is away, he can’t be because he is too busy loving Giovanni. The descriptive language used by the author helps the audience comprehend David’s guilt on his sexuality and its effect on his

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Although throughout the entire novel David denies the fact that he is homosexual, he admits his emotions towards Giovanni. While still struggling to understand his sexual orientation and why he does not fit the expectations of masculinity that he desires more than anything, David eventually abandons Giovanni with out any warning, only to find out later that Giovanni is in jail awaiting his execution for the murder of the owner of the bar where he worked. David’s self-denial and social alienation is responsible for his guilt he feels about Giovanni’s execution. David is fully aware that he let Giovanni down, having him in Paris to seek refuge in his own idyllic world. David’s social alienation and avoidance of expressing his sexuality will lead to a loss of his true identity.

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'Alice in Wonderland ' by Lewis Carroll is a novel that criticizes the way children were brought up during the Victorian society. Carroll presents the readers with the difficulties these offspring must endure in order to develop their own personalities/egos, as they become adults. For Alice, Wonderland appears to be the perfect place to start this learning adventure. A way to see her story is compering it to the world as if being upside-down. The first lesson Alice must learn in this peculiar journey through Wonderland is to achieve separation from the world around her and to stop identifying herself through others, in order to discover who she really is and who she wants to become in the future.

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The Rabbit goes through stages of his appearance to finally realize what “Real” means, and it took the help of the Boy and the Fairy who impacted the Rabbit’s life. The Boy provided temporary love to the Rabbit and allowed for the Rabbit to gain real life characteristics . The Rabbit was a beautiful toy that was always overlooked but later realizes that with the help of the characters, it takes self-love to actually become

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To draw further scrutiny to Victorian conventions, Carroll incorporates several languages features and play. Employing the use of the useless educational system in Victorian society, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland depicts several moments within its tale where Alice attempts to conduct herself by reciting facts she learned in school to try and maintain a sense of her life prior to falling down the rabbit hole into the world of Wonderland. The first evidence of this occurring features in the first chapter succeeding her tumble. She begins to wonder how far she has fallen and attempts calculating the exact distance away from the centre of the Earth she is; “let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think […] but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?”

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