The page that I chose in Jimmy Corrigan is very near the beginning of the book. The lack of page numbers makes it difficult to say exactly where it is, but it’s the page on which Jimmy receives the letter from his father.
It begins with Jimmy daydreaming about Peggy, the mail woman in the office where Jimmy works. This is the first of Jimmy’s daydreams that Ware puts in the book. As another poster said, Jimmy’s daydreams are the most interesting thing about him. He has his head in the clouds all day long, lost in fantasy lives far more interesting and satisfying than his own.
Jimmy is jarred out of his fantasy by Peggy snapping at him to “take your mail and get out of here!” This demonstrates an important aspect of the novel: that the people around him have very little patience or liking for Jimmy. His social ineptitude forms a barrier which prevents people from getting to know or like him.
After getting his mail, Jimmy goes back to his cubicle and reads the mail. The first letter he opens is from his father, and says that he feels that he and Jimmy should get together and get to know each other. It includes a plane ticket to where Jimmy’s father lives. This gives the reader another very important plot point: Jimmy has never met his father. In only a little bit more than one row of panels, Ware has given the reader three important points about the book.
Once he has read the letter from his father, his phone rings. His overattentive mother is calling him at work, something he’s told her never to do. She asks him if he’s received the letter she sent: “a funny joke letter to cheer you up.” Jimmy assumes that the letter he believed to be from his father is nothing more than a joke from his mother. He is crushed by this, but his lack of emotional response means that we see only a small outward sign of this. However, when going through the rest of his mail, he finds a letter from his mom, containing a $5 bill and a childish greeting card. His father’s letter is real.
The mother’s card, along with her constant phone calls, says a lot about how she thinks of Jimmy. She thinks of him as still being a child, unable to cope with the world without her constant assistance and support, and Jimmy is too timid to disabuse her of this idea.
Jimmy’s timidness on many other occasions is the reason why he gets nowhere in life, stuck with a dead-end job and no real friends. Jimmy could do something with his life - achieve something, perhaps even be happy - if he could overcome his timidity. Unfortunately for him, he can’t, and the reader must watch him struggle through a long series of depressing banalities. It’s fortunate that Chris Ware is as talented a storyteller as he is, because in other hands, this book could well be unreadable.
The scene I chose, too, had Jimmy fantasize about a woman he “loves.” In that scene, he dreamed about the nurse at the hospital who helped him out with the urine bucket. It seems to me that Jimmy often daydreams about women who has helped in one way or another. In the scene you mentioned, Peggy “helps” Jimmy by finding and handing him his mails. The help from the nurse is rather obvious. I think Jimmy shows his immaturity you mentioned in both scenes. He, like a child, thinks there could be a connection with woman if she helps him out. It’s true that Jimmy’s mom does treat him like he is a child despite his age, but it is interesting to see how he does actually act like one at times.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the daydreams themselves, I think Ware could be portraying what people do in their normal lives. Someone in class mentioned how if we drew cartoons of our normal day, it would be filled with panels with no words, because after all, we do not constantly talk throughout the day. It is most likely that we spend these times thinking, and some of those thoughts are daydreams of our own. We don’t really share it with others due to their silly nature, but we do have them. I believe Ware uses daydreams to show how people cope with uneventful mundane parts of their normal day. In Jimmy’s case however, it is a method he uses to cope with his excruciatingly boring and uneventful life, which makes it look very silly to us readers.