![]() While no mention is made of Aristotle in the text, Hart begins and ends his story with oak trees and acorns, the same example that Aristotle famously used to illustrate the difference between actuality and potentiality. ![]() Both of these features deepen Hart’s exploration of grief and allow him to give a fuller account of the process. He structures his story around two dominant forms of thought in the West: Aristotle’s metaphysics and the literary genre of epic. Hart acknowledges this aspect of grief through his story structure, and through the combination of words and pictures, which allows him to depict multiple stages of grief at once. ![]() ![]() The phenomenon of grief is hard to understand fully while experiencing it, in part because it is not a linear process that moves toward healing. Midway through his graphic memoir, cartoonist Tom Hart comes to an abrupt and pointed question: “What do you do when your child dies?” In the next frame, he answers the question: “You fall into a hole.” Hart’s meditation on grief gives the graphic details of how he and his wife, Leela, crawled out of that hole following the unexpected death of their toddler Rosalie. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |