Day Dreams

Something that stuck out to me from Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth was the way it allowed the reader into Jimmy’s head. Scenes in his life are often briefly interrupted to display the day dreams running through Jimmy’s head, always without warning and always with much detail. The reader is usually unaware that the graphic novel has strayed from reality until the daydream is over. Throughout the novel, Jimmy is fairly silent and apart from brief narration in cursive from time to time, so it is rather difficult to read him. This is precisely where the day dreams come in to give insight on Jimmy’s take on any situation.

Being as quiet as he is, it is not surprising that Jimmy has cultured a creative world within his own imagination to help him to perceive and process his world. His daydreams early in the novel feature a science fiction and fantasy theme. He sees a robot on an aircraft, surveying the world with its bright spotlight of an eye. The robot comes to symbolize himself as it answers to the name Jimmy and receives a crutch just like the one Jimmy uses for his foot injury. Jimmy uses this day dream to cope with how he sees himself as different from everyone else and feels like an outcast. His fantasy daydream portrays Jimmy as a father, confident and calm, recounting the story of his father’s rage over the stolen car, a moment he is currently living through. It is his feeble attempt to cope with seeing his father so angry, but the day dream quickly goes sour with Superman dropping the house with Jimmy and son included from a great height. Jimmy is left searching for his son’s body parts and is forced to smash his son’s suffering head with a cinder block. This possibly symbolizes Jimmy’s own fear of having children and being unable to be a good father to them just as his father wasn’t for him and his father before that.

The majority of Jimmy’s daydreams could be called disturbing as his daydream of his potential father ends in his brother being stabbed to pieces with a pitchfork for borrowing his father’s car. He daydreams of being forced to shoot his brother who is portrayed as a miniature horse. Jimmy daydreams of having intercourse with any females he meets, especially those who are friendly to him. These more disturbing daydreams are likely a result of his abandonment by his father as a child and his inability to connect with others as a result of this. Jimmy’s daydreams in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth provide a great amount of insight into Jimmy’s character.