Dana Payne

Seminar in Composition

Dr. Adam Johns

10/21/08

Chris Ware’s graphic novel “Jimmy Corrigan” is not only the story of a sad, lonely, pathetic man, but the story of how people like him are reared.  It is a story of how the failings of people carry on through time via their offspring--one of how incomplete parenting can lead to incomplete people.  In this story, it is made very clear that the shortcomings of one’s parents during childhood are irreparable in adulthood.  Jimmy is made to suffer, unknowingly or not, his entire life because of the absence of the important idol in a young boy’s life:  his father.  Though his mother is no better because she treated her young son as more of a burden than a blessing.  The effects of poor or absent parents in childhood inevitably carry on to the future and cannot be rectified.

Through the very first pages of the graphic novel, we get a glimpse of an interaction between Jimmy and his mother, which is remarkably one-sided.  It consists mostly of Jimmy’s mother berating him and nagging him constantly while the boy had barely said or done anything worthy of punishment.  She is cold to him, and even though it is in print, one can almost hear the harshness in her voice.  As a child, it means the world to impress their parents or to make them happy in anyway they could just so they could feel the joy of their parents’ approval.  Or at least this was the case for me.  Parents like Jimmy’s mother do not consider their words or the manner in which they are speaking to their children.  Jimmy’s mother did not nurture him in anyway as a mother should.  She subdued him in order to make him less of a hindrance for her.  This carries on into adulthood with Jimmy, making him a submissive, spineless man.  Then we see when Jimmy is an adult, his mother is constantly calling him to the point of being just plain annoying.  As evidenced in about pages fifteen through twenty, though Jimmy had insisted that she not call him at work, she does anyway.  I consider this consistent contact that his mother has with him an attempt at repentance for her lack of motherly love during his childhood:  the motherly love that would have aided him in developing into a socially adept adult.  The reader can easily see that Jimmy’s choice of clothes have not changed since he was a child.  Also after analyzing his physical mannerisms closely, the reader can see that he has the habit of holding his hands close to his mouth when he is worried or uncomfortable (which admittedly is most of the time).   These small nuances in the graphic novel are all proof that Jimmy has never really developed out of childhood mentally.  

Even if his mother had been the greatest nurturer on the planet, I do not believe it would have been enough to help develop Jimmy into a complete person mentally and socially.  Were he a female rather than a male, it would have been, but the fact is a boy needs a father around to emulate.  Young boys learn a great deal of knowledge from their fathers.  They find coinciding interests, learn to bond with others, and how to be an independent and socially acceptable person.  One of the most important things that young boys learn from their fathers is how to treat women.  Because of the absence of Jimmy’s father he never acquires this knowledge, and the only female he knows how to treat is his mother.  This leads to an evident case of the Oedipus complex:  a desire that boys sometimes have to kill their father and mate with their mother.  Jimmy portrays this aggression most evidently on the page in which he brutally attack his father who had just finished having intercourse with who was assumed to be Jimmy’s mother.  He uses a broken glass to slice open his father’s back.  It’s so brutal that I cannot even look at the image without cringing and looking away.  When Jimmy has a fantasy while eating with his father in the diner, it is of he and an unknown female in bed together.  In this fantasy his is verbally cruel to the woman and leaves her.  This is a portrayal of how he has come to think of woman as fleeting forms of entertainment and pleasurable, even worse they are disposable.  In his fantasies, he puts himself in the position of power with him denying the woman, while it is reversed in real life.  This fantasy is a glimpse of how he sees women--a view that would be completely different had he had a decent father figure.  As previously stated, Jimmy is very much a push over in every aspect.  Had his father been around and had he been a good father, Jimmy would have learned strength of will and character from him, but now it is too late.  Jimmy has already become the person he will be for the rest of his life by the time he is contacted by his father.  

Both Jimmy’s father and mother are at fault.  His mother made him into a simpering, spineless being that truly never developed into an adult.  His father’s absence left him to grow without social skills, confidence as a man, and the knowledge of how to associate with and treat women as more than fleeting fancies.  Both of his parents try to fix their mistakes when Jimmy is an adult.  Also, both of their attempts are worthless because the damage is already done.