After reading Watchmen, I had no idea which direction the class would go. Lynda Berry’s graphic novel was not at all what I was expecting. I wasn’t expecting a graphic novel that would make me look inside myself. The two lessons we have done so far, although very similar, made my remember two very different points in my life. I enjoyed the trip down memory lane, but I realized that these memories needed a good amount of thought on my part, in order to be fully fleshed out. It was easy for me to recall the car, but it was harder to recall the memories surrounding the car. For instance, I really had to think about what was going on that day in my memory. I had a bunch of different images in my head, and Berry’s challenge was to put them together to flesh out a full memory.
This was also done in the second lesson with other people’s mothers. At first I wondered, “why other people’s moms? Why not my own mother?” I realized that this is because it is so easy to come up with multiple memories of your own mother. However, it is harder to pick one distinct memory because of the quantity. When looking at another person’s mother, you have a very specific memory associated with them. In this case, I remembered an image of my best friend’s mother. It was from a long time ago, and I had a hard time figuring out why that specific memory came to mind. Again, I had multiple different images of the same memory, like with the car. Like before, I followed Berry’s challenge to piece together all of the images into one cohesive memory.
These assignments are really cool, in that they help me remember things that I haven’t thought about in awhile. I get a nice sense of nostalgia that I wouldn’t have initially gotten. This is the first graphic novel that I have ever read that looks at images and how they can come together to form memories. In fact, it is the first novel altogether where this has happened. Because images are so important in a graphic novel class, I think Berry’s novel is a worthwhile venture.