Monday, April 19, 2010

Sounds of silence

I was struck by all the silence in the book. It was amazing how much of the story was told with only the drawings.

Pages would go by without any dialogue between the characters. Most of the emotions are communicated through glares or little coughs or slamming cabinets. It seemed almost fitting that after growing up in a household of silence, David's voice is taken by cancer.

3 comments:

kc said...

Yes, great point! The silence was a voice all its own, and what a brilliant way his wordless drawings had of conveying the perpetual tension and the toxic environment of his childhood.

Erin said...

I had to purposefully slow myself down as I read so that I would consider each drawing, since it would be easy to breeze past the panels without words. I thought the drawing style conveyed emotion remarkably well.

kc said...

I did too! We process visual information so quickly that it's easy to get the gist and move on, but there's so much more detail to be absorbed in these drawings.