Visual Hyperbole

We're kicking off with Blankets, which I read the day before class started because I had spent the entire winter vacation sitting in my room wondering what it would be like to have friends who stayed in town during break. Even with all that wondering, every day, I still don't know what it would be like. All I know is what it's like to live with two people who leave the lights on when they leave the apartment and never do the dishes. I picked up a lot of extra hours at work, just to get away from the dishes. They're still there.

Waiting.




I was going to talk about Blankets as a whole (should that be italicized? I don't even care, it's the INTERNET) but I looked at the syllabus and I'm going to have to make four more blog posts about it before we're done, so I better save that stuff for last. Instead I want to talk about Thompson's use of visual hyperbole.

On page 16, Thompson's father opens up "the cubby hole," a space full of blank-eyed demons, insects, and other creatures. Thompson's father struggles with the clamping jaws of an alligator with the same sort of detached yet focused expression that he would have while mowing the lawn or hanging new curtains. This hyperbole goes beyond the typical "cartooning" of human actions and drifts into the realm of the fantastical, which is helpful and understandable, considering that our focalizer is a young boy. In text, we can understand the semantic meaning of "the cubby hole was very scary," or even the less direct, more evocative "the cubby hole was a nightmare, full of crouched, hellish figures," but neither of these gives us as direct and visceral an understanding of how terrifying the space is as the image of Thompson's father subduing the creatures living in the space.

We see an example of hyperbole again on page 60, when Thompson burns his drawings from years past in an effort to erase the memories of his tortured past. We see them expelled from his mouth as jagged lines, reminiscent of lightning, that resolve into the shapes of his drawings and escape into the night sky. This is a different sort of hyperbole than the cubby hole; while the cubby is detailed in a goofy, kid-scared-of-the-dark way, we are meant to take Craig's artistic catharsis as more heavily symbolic - as an inherently more dramatic act. This separation helps to highlight the separation of time periods found in the chapter.