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