The Murder Of Sabrina, By Nick Drnaso

There is a striking sequence of images on page 118 of Nick Drnaso’s (2018) Sabrina where Teddy, the late husband of murder victim Sabrina, is sitting half-naked and cross-legged on the floor of an empty room listening to a conspiracy theorist proselytise through the radio about the recently uncovered tape of his (Teddy’s) wife’s brutal murder. The conspiracy theorist rambles to listeners with callous consideration of Sabrina’s dignity, fixated instead on some amorphous ‘truth’ beyond the facts at hand. What’s striking about this page is the complete aesthetic austerity of the graphic novel in the face of such an emotionally laden scene. Of the twelve panels in this page, we see Teddy’s face in three, and of those three we can see his expression

Later in the novel a mass shooting occurs which serves to shift most of these detectives (both amateur and legitimate) away from Sabrina and towards these new events. This is one of the more discernible acts of commentary in Sabrina. Drnaso is interested in representing how people respond to hoaxes, fake news and indeterminate truth. He frames these events by positioning readers as the detectives and sleuths, trying to uncover how all the threads and characters tie-in together. Danielle Citron (2020) suggests that the characters of Sabrina mirror how real people make meaning. When there is limited information or no clear “truth”, individual's provide their own experience to fill the gaps. This can sometimes have a negative effect where confirmation bias occurs and an individual interprets the event only in terms of its consistency with their pre-existing views and discredits evidence which goes against these views (Citron, 2020). These views often occurs within Sabrina in characters like the radio conspirator and the anonymous emailer, who both attempt to connect deeper details and tangential evidence to Sabrina’s murder and presume there must be something else at work. These

It means that what they get out of the book must be, in part, determined by them. Sabrina achieves this indeterminacy by involving content, form, and hermeneutics. The potential result of such an extreme experiment in indeterminacy can be both positive and negative. For some, the book may be inscrutable or even liable to confirming their bias’s because the text doesn’t offer resistance enough that would otherwise result in deeper self-reflection. However, for others – and perhaps even the possibility of this alternative makes the novel a successful literary experiment by Drnaso – the lack of meaning to help them interpret the text means they must strive to find or make their own meaning out of Sabrina. A process which requires one to examine the beliefs that may have previously been unconsciously held, and teach them how to “see rather than to look, and to listen rather than to hear” (Habegger-Conti, pp.