Lydia Lifquist 04/1/24 CWL 315 Sec. 05. “Stitches”: The Power of Mental Health What can be said through words can also be expressed through art, but only art can speak where words are lost. This statement rings true in David Small’s “Stitches,” a graphic memoir that retells the complexities of his upbringing as a coming-of-age story in fluid grayscale imagery. Small details his life through a series of defining moments as a child of parents with silent frustrations, a cancer survivor, and a troubled young adult struggling to make peace with the tragedies and emotional trauma experienced in childhood. The memories Small relives on the page are conveyed with art as the primary medium, using writing as a guide throughout the graphic novel. Using …show more content…
In the illustrated dream sequence, a pile of dark and towering rubble is seen on the final page with the only source of light surrounding Small, described by the text, “(.) into that temple whose guts had been bombed," (Small, 242). Both the art and the text rely on symbolism to portray the true meaning of the dream. The small temple entrance can be said to be a symbol for the mind, a space that is often a personal sanctuary or sacred place for many others. In addition, the pile of rubble is the “guts” of the temple that had been “bombed,” which could symbolize that there had been a traumatic event that affected the psychological state of his mind, known as the temple. Both of these symbols can represent mental health, and how emotional stress can seem to “attack” the mind, resulting in the bombed temple illustrated by Small. Further, the pile of rubble that serves as a symbol for stress and trauma appears to tower over Small, seemingly spanning the entire temple. This may represent how emotional distress can build up and become larger over the years, leading to the cluttered mass of rubble seen in the image. The author experienced much distress as a result of his parents' treatment of him, their buried anger