Intro To Rhetoric And Narrative Analysis

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Daytripper is a graphic novel by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. It is about Bras de Oliva Domingos, an obituary writer living in Brazil and who dies at the end of every chapter. It is equally about life and death and how they are incomplete without the other. Similarly Intro to Rhetoric and Narrative or ENC 1143 is about what a narrative is and how it is incomplete without questioning the meaning behind it. ENC 1143 asks students to question everything about a narrative. For example what does an author’s stylistic choices mean or why does the order of a narrative matter? Daytripper allows students to ask these questions and more, and that is why it is a good choice for the course. Daytripper uses illustrations, a character that dies at the end …show more content…
Daytripper’s illustrations are fantastically colorful, but firmly grounded in reality. For this is Bras’ life, death, and dreams. But why use the concept of a graphic novel to tell this story? Would it have been as effectively told using a more traditional format? Daytripper’s very existence calls upon students to ask why this format and not another? It may seem peculiar to use a graphic novel to further what is essentially a writing class, but writing is about getting a story or a point across to an audience. Ba and Moon use illustrations to efficiently tell a story by showing it to their audience. They felt the need to use illustrations to do that, so they did. Moreover Ba and Moon are effective in using bright illustrations to “reproduce feelings” (Moon). For instance, when Bras’ goes to his father’s study to retrieve a baby gown, the authors’ use somber shades to set the tone for one of Bras’ deaths, this time a heart attack (101-104). Most of Bras’ deaths are colored in darkness. In sharp contrast, when Bras dies at eleven, the pages showing his death are bright, almost cheerful. While his is reaching for his kite he is electrocuted, yet the coloring never changes tones (pg. 128). Though this is a story about death, the illustrations never let the reader forget the beauty to be found in …show more content…
This is interesting since Bras writes obituaries for his job and later in the book this is what launches Bras career as a novelist. So who writes the obituaries for Bras? With the exclusion of the ninth and tenth chapters, the obituaries’ author or authors are otherwise unknown. Does this relate back to the course in that the author of the story matters less than the story itself? That if you can get your story out into the real world and have it connect to other people, be it a specific audience or not, it doesn’t matter who wrote the story? Or is it like the point Ba and Moon are showing, that like life and death are intertwined, the author and their story are the same. Daytripper starts with Bras writing obituaries. At the beginning of chapter seven when Bras is thirty-eight, he has become famous for his novel Silken Eyes. The reader see that because his audience liked the book, they also feel as if they know him. (156-157)This is very Meta in that Ba and Moon must know what that feels like, being authors
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