Analysis

Life and death are two things that have always fascinated and terrified me.  Ever since I was young, I always saw death as an unknown entity.  We have no way of knowing whether there is anything after out hearts stop beating and that unknown element scares me even to this day.  Life is something that I only began really thinking about after I had gotten older.  I am always wondering if there is actually any purpose in life and if we are put on this earth for a reason or if we are born simply to eventually die.  This might seem like a rather hopeless way to look at life but these are the kinds of things that go through my head whenever I try to think about life.  I see life as a thing that can at points contain great beauty and hope and at other times seem like a cold, uncaring existence that we are simply stumbling through with no real direction.  My fascination with the ideas of life and death is what first attracted me to the story of Daytripper, but after reading through the book, I almost felt as though the book had given me a new outlook on life.

Daytripper, written and drawn by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, is about a man named Bras de Olivias Dominguez.  Bras is the son of a world famous writer who dreams of becoming a writer himself.  Bras laments that fact that despite his attempts to become an actual writer, he is stuck writing obituaries for a newspaper.  Daytripper can be a confusing book because of the way that it is told.  Each chapter of the story begins in various stages of Bras' life, starting at the age of 32 and then going to various points in his past and his future.  The interesting thing is that each chapter ends with Bras dying.  Each chapter ends with Bras' death as well as an obituary article going over what Bras had accomplished in his life.  The book does not really become a concrete narrative until the last chapter which see Bras as an old man.  All the chapters showing different parts of his life all lead to this final chapter where Bras is an old man who has just been told that he has cancer.  Unlike the other chapters, where Bras died suddenly and sometimes violently, Bras now see death as something that should not be feared.  He has lived through the various points in his life that the reader has seen in the previous chapters and he feels that he has lived a good life. The story might seem confusing at first, but even though I was a little confused at first, I was still deeply impacted by the story.

Daytripper shows life as something that is mysterious and at times frightening, but it also shows it in a hopeful light, showing all the dreams and struggles of one man all culminating in a life well lived.  It shows death as something that should not be feared because it is something that will come for all of us one day.  The story shows us how life should be lived to its fullest and that we should consider what our life would be viewed like if we were to die today.  The obituary articles at the end of each chapters show how Bras' life was described was perceived after dying at the various points in his life.  The various deaths shown were at times shocking and violent and at other times peaceful and quiet.  The story shows death as something that cannot be avoided and most of the time is not pleasant, but it is not something that we can run away from. Death, as hard as it might be to accept, is something that will eventually come for all of us and there is no point fearing it because there is nothing that we can do to stop it.   We all will face trials and tribulations during our lives and we will all have days where we feel as though life is hopeless, but in the end, we all live exactly once and we should try to live our lives to the fullest.  We should never give up on our dreams and when life gets us down we just have to get up and keep moving because life is too short and unpredictable to waste on feelings of hopelessness and sorrow.

Life and death are still things that occasionally frighten me and I still feel a sense of hopelessness every now in then, but I am being completely honest when I say that Daytripper actually partially changed my viewpoints on life.  It made me think about my life and how no matter how much I do not want it to happen, I will eventually die, and there is nothing I can do about it.  It might sound cliched, but this book made me feel that life is too short to simply focus on the the bad.  There is so much beauty in the world and to ignore these things simply because you have gone through some tough times is just a waste.  Since Daytripper is a graphic novel, I can't really fully portray the beauty of this story without being able to show the great artwork in it but just know that the art complements the story perfectly and makes and already amazing story a classic in my mind.

“Life is like a book son. And every book has an end. No matter how much you like that book you will get to the last page and it will end. No book is complete without its end. And once you get there, only when you read the last words, will you see how good the book is.” 
― Fábio Moon, Daytripper

Response

Hatred can mean different things to different people.  To me hatred is beyond just a simple dislike of something.  Hatred is when there is absolutely no sympathy or good will towards something.  Hatred can be directed towards a person, thing, place, or idea and leads to extreme anger and hostility towards the target of the hatred.  Hate is a word that is tossed around a lot lately, but almost never with the actual meaning of the word being correctly used.  Many times people use the word hate to describe something they dislike but hatred goes far beyond a simple dislike.  Hate means that you have absolutely no sympathy or understanding for these things.  If you hate a person, then you might actually wish harm on this person and you will have no remorse for having these thoughts.  There are people who feel hatred for an entire race of people and those people formed hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis.  People who have and extreme hatred for a place or ideal can become terrorists to try to tear these places or ideas down.  Hate is so powerful and consuming that many people do not even know how it feels to truly hate something even though they might think that they do.

Using myself as an example, I use the word hate almost every day to describe various things that I dislike.  Whether it is about top 100 pop music, reality television, or fashion news, I use the word hate to describe a large amount of things.  But do I truly hate these things?  I definitely strongly dislike these things and I would not shed a tear if these things were suddenly taken off the face of the earth but I think that my feelings for these things are not true hatred because while I do not like any of these things, they are no things that I really think about unless I am actually around them.  If I felt true hatred towards these things, my hatred for them would occupy my thoughts even if there was nothing around that had anything to do with the things that I hated.  For the sake of comparison, I will take something that I actually do hate, bullies, and compare my feelings to that to my feelings towards a lesser thing like reality television.  Reality television is something that annoys me to no end.  I feel that reality tv is a completely mindless and worthless form of entertainment and I honestly cannot understand how anyone can gain any sort of enjoyment from watching idiots act like idiots and making large amounts of money for acting like idiots.  While I do have an extreme dislike for reality tv, it is not truly hatred. 

Bullies on the other hand are something that I truly believe I feel genuine hatred for.  To me a bully is someone who treats others as less than human.  A bully will target someone for no real reason and make their lives a living hell for kicks.  We live in an age where suicide among teenagers is a fairly common thing and bullying is largely to blame for this.  No matter the reason for doing it, bullying is despicable and can ruin people’s lives.  I was bullied when I was younger and it made me feel sub-human.  It made me feel as though I was unloved and unwanted and this might be the reason for my hatred of bullies.  With a minor thing like reality television, I might not like it and I will not understand why other people like it, I will at least accept it as a differing of opinions.  With bullying, there is no reason anyone could ever give me that would make me have any sort of understanding or sympathy for a bully.  I constantly hear about how bullies usually do what they do because they themselves are insecure and hurting on the inside.  Whether this is true or not is not excuse for someone tormenting another person to the point where they consider taking their own lives.  As a young kid and even during a lot of my teen years, I was bullied for being overweight.  This made me terribly self-conscious for my entire life, but at the time that it actually happened it made me feel as though there was something wrong with me.  It made me full ashamed of myself and it pretty much made it impossible for me to feel good about myself.  Yes, this could partially be blamed on me not having much in the way of self-esteem to begin with, but knowing what it is like to be bullied gives me some understanding with those people who decide that they cannot take being bullied anymore.

What I was getting at with that long tirade against bullying is to show the difference between true hatred and a simple dislike of something.  Reality television is something that annoys me but it has never been more than a simple annoyance.  Me being bullied as a kid changed my entire perception about the world, myself, and other people.  As a young kid, I was pretty much always happy and trusting.  As I grew up though, and I saw in the news and in my own experiences how bullying effected people, I changed.  It used to be that I thought that everyone was a good person but as I grew up, my views changed to where I saw people as uncaring and judgmental and I saw the world as a much colder place. All this has been a way of telling how my hatred for something actually changed my perception and view of the world.  In a way, it even changed my personality and view of myself.  I began believing everything that the bullies said about me and this created a sense of self-loathing in me.  Even now, I still occasionally have these feelings and I can’t help but feel that part of it is because I was bullied as a child.

As I said at the beginning, hatred is something far beyond a simple dislike for something.  It is something that is capable of changing a person.  There are a lot of things that are targets for hatred, some just and some that are far less so.  You will always hear someone talking about how much they hate something but it will almost never be true hatred that these people are talking about.