Working With It

I’m going to come right out with it and say I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience of reading Nat Turner. Part of it is personal preference. I’ve never been one for comics (and I know this transcends comics, but it’s a similar style of reading). I found the material upsetting (if not unfamiliar) and I thought some of the text in the story was hard to understand. I didn’t know what was going on part of the time. When thinking about what the heck I was going to say in my blog post, I started trying to focus on what questions could be discussed about the text.

The first useful aspect of the text I came up with is the fact that even though this is a graphic novel, there is still plenty of room to discuss the author’s intention. From his introduction, it’s clear that Kyle Baker considers Nat Turner to be more a hero than a criminal. But then he includes really graphic material about murdering children (over and over) and you have to ask why. If he really sees Turner as a hero, wouldn’t he minimize the murder of innocent children and focus on the righteous outrage? It was an interesting choice to me.

Also, I think his decision to include Turner’s significant religious inspiration puts the text in a position of swaying readers purely by virtue of their own religious views. A person who doesn’t believe in organized religion, for example, may consider Turner to be a lunatic zealot instead of understanding his emotional reasons for the uprising, based on his (very understandable) motivations from his past. I don’t know – I just see the focus on his religious inspiration to be polarizing (for better or for worse). It would have been much easier to position him as a hero by glossing over his heavenly inspiration and sticking with the facts of his life – which were horrible enough to drive many a man to such acts.

I think, overall, the problematic aspect of the text is the fact that the author sets the expectation he’ll be treating Nat Turner as a hero and then shows a number of things in the story that make him difficult to support. So why do that? Was it Baker’s intention to raise the discussion of whether or not Turner was really a hero? That’s probably what I would focus on in my class.

One thought on “Working With It

  1. Professor Sample

    As I mentioned in another comment, one thing to keep in mind in reading Nat Turner is the source text that Baker was working with. It’s impossible to read The Confessions of Nat Turner and not be struck be Turner’s level of religious fervor. Taken in context, the infusion of Biblical imagery would not have surprised readers at the time (though they would have been surprised that a slave could read and had educated himself). So Baker was demonstrating a kind of fidelity to the source material (though as we will talk about later, perhaps he accepts the Confessions too readily as accurately representing Turner’s authentic voice).

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