Nat Turner’s is a complex story, which I knew little to nothing about prior to my experience with Nat Turner in graphic narrative form.  The background reading for this week though left me, like Joy, wondering about whether background would’ve been a help or a hindrance in this situation.

It probably says more about me as a reader than Baker as a writer/illustrator/designer, but I didn’t realize until the articles this week that Nat Turner’s Confession was not only not written by Nat Turner himself, but by a man who had suspect motive and not altogether trustworthy credibility.  That was one of the most eye opening things that the readings for this week, and it makes me wonder if it’s possible to tell Nat’s story in anything but an extremely biased way since the main source we have on the event may be a biased account masquerading as something objectively truthful.

Despite not being sure about the interpretation of events, the readings and photographs for this week lent a sense of reality to what was otherwise a slightly unreal, otherworldly tale.  Actually seeing the photographs of the areas where the rebellion took place, especially done in a similar coloring to the illustrations in Baker’s book, made it seem even more real for me.  Too, there were parts where Baker’s illustrations combined with the “Confession” left me feeling more confused than anything else.  The account of Nat knowing things that had happened before his birth was one place that left me feeling that there must be more to the story, and Kenneth Greenberg’s piece helped me fill in that gap.  It doesn’t seem that we know a great deal about what exactly that event was that Nat recalled, but it became more clear to me that everyone who knew Nat saw that time, and other events, as markers that Nat was destined for greatness.

I’m not sure where all that leaves me about knowing what to do with background information.  I enjoyed my first read of the story in more of a purely for the story sort of way—I was trying to understand what was going on, rather than trying to do any sort of in-depth interpretation.  And I liked that.  But, I also like reading it again after developing more of an understanding of what was happening, looking for places that Gray’s influence may have slipped into the account, and looking for places where Baker had to make an interpretive decision.  This worked well for this sort of situation where the readers can probably be trusted to actually go back and read the main text a second time.  I don’t know that it would be possible to approach a story this way every time, but I do think “withholding” background information at the beginning can be a positive way of reading a story.