Life and Death as Theme in the Graphic Novel Daytripper

A new post in my on-going series of posting my critical work from graduate school, we’re exploring the themes of life and death in the graphic novel, Daytripper.

Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba uses the theme of life and death to analyze the life of its main character, an aspiring novelist who writes obituaries and lives in the long shadow of a literary father. All the tools are used in this graphic novel to create the life and death of the main character. The first section dives right into death as a theme when Bras is killed in a robbery at a bar while buying cigarettes. 

Narration is potent in reinforcing the themes of life and death. The book does not lean on the artwork to tell the story but uses the juxtaposition of the writer’s life, the death he writes about every day, and then his own death to get both the character and the reader in a liminal place between life and death. This liminal place is where the story takes place. 

This book uses life and death as a theme, beginning in the first section, where we see the final quote of an obituary writer who, through an accident, needs an obituary of his own. “Bras De Oliva Domingos wanted to be a novelist, but he didn’t live long enough to write his masterpiece. He died of a broken heart left by the mysterious and voluptuous woman he met in Salvador. The thing is nobody told Bras he was dead…so he showed up to work anyway.”  

In the story, we see how Bras might have lived his life if he had lived. By the end, we are wondering if everything was a dream or if it’s real. The storytelling makes it feel real, but we are often pulled out to be reminded that it is something entirely different. When Bras is ready to jump off a cliff to try and wake up, his friend stops him and says, “You know you can’t just run away forever…”  

In the course of the story, Bras De Oliva Domingos lives and dies several lives. The reader is left to contemplate what reality we are in. The theme of life and death blends the past, present, future, potential pasts, and potential futures in a whirl of emotions, deaths, and lives lived. This is juxtaposed with Bras’ relationship with his father as well. He has conversations with his father that he always wanted to have and garners wisdom. If life is the thing that is lived between birth and death, the theme of this book becomes a sort of the third character. Every aspect of the story brings up the constant struggle between life and death. We are reminded that life is very temporary, especially during a scene on pages 138-139 when Bras covers a plane crash. Birth is a risk (which we see three times), and death is one of the only certainties in life. Throughout the several deaths that occur in the book, this theme repeats like a drum beat. 

The theme asks the question, “what is life?” Bras talks with his friends about it and the many different women he engages, marries, and loves in the many possible futures of his life. Is life love? The book seems to posit that idea. Are we simply who we love? In one of his deaths, Bras see an attractive woman in the market and chases after her and gets ran over by a truck trying to chase after her. In the course of the book, he has children whom he loves but often does not understand. His own relationship with his father changes when he becomes a father. Is life the children we have and love? Are they a symbol of the love we share with each other in the course of our lives? What is life? The book posits that life is the little moments before the finality and blackness of death. 

At the end of the book, we see a possible future for Bras at the end of his life. The last few pages are black as the book finally ends and closes the liminal space between life and death that provides the backdrop for the plot. It is a powerful way to end the story. This book uses the theme to ask and try to answer life’s big questions. It becomes clear that the story wrestles with the fleeting nature of life. We will lose our parents, eventually die ourselves (sometimes sooner rather than later), and all that is left is the experience of what we did. Life is a struggle against death which always looms both in life and on the page. Children are the only way we live, but they have their own lives. Bras has his own life, separate from his father, and his children have their own lives, which are constrained by the same idea. What is it to live? That is the question within this powerful graphic novel. 

This different kind of storytelling inspires me to think about the theme in my own work. The theme is usually something I think about at the end of the project when I can see the whole thing, but I think that perhaps I can make a more excellent point if I think about the theme more often.