I’m not sure what to make of In My Darkest Hour. Overall I found the narrative dry and non-compelling and the characters completely uninteresting and unsympathetic. I wish to clarify this last point. I’m not saying that I disliked the characters (I did, but that isn’t really pertinent), but instead I am saying that there was nothing in the narrative or the characters that made me care one way or the other what happened to them.
I have the biggest beef with Omar, however, since he is the protagonist and “narrator.” The book is essentially from his perspective, so we are forced to move along with him, but I frankly struggled a lot with finishing this book because I did not care about this character. Omar embodies the classic and pervasive narcissism of manic depression. He does not care about Lucinda or any of the women in his life. He is focused solely on himself and what others can provide for him, all while blaming others for the things that are going wrong in his life. Even after 9/11, all he can think about is how it affects him and how he “doesn’t feel anything anymore.”
Are we supposed to care about what this character does or what happens to him? Presumably we are, since someone took the time to write a whole book about him, but I honestly cannot find a compelling reason to do so. His depression and some of the thoughts he has are relatbable to people with bi-polar disorder or similar problems, but having depression is not a character arc. He’s narcissitic and a jerk because of his depression, but so what? Lots of people suffer from the same type of disorder and feel the same accute feelings of depression, self-loathing, and self-destruction but are not jerks. Omar does not face any major existential questions or grapple with his depression, or really do anything. Things happen around him. He is just floating around. Any improvement in his condition, or regression, seems completely coincidental and does not appear to have any connection to his actions.There was nothing compelling about this character, and as such, there was very little compelling about the book as a whole.
Phineas,
You won’t find any argument here. And I, too, struggled to even finish the book.
But Why? After all, I liked Jimmy Corrigan, and that too had a horny, depressed, and confused protagonist. (Perhaps we never thought we’d say this, but didn’t JC’s plot seem almost linear in comparison to IMDH?) At the least, there’s a complexity and intelligence behind Ware’s design that far outshines anything that Santiago chucks at us. Am I just that addicted to artifice, to construction?
Probably.
I guess at the end of the day, I felt like the best term to describe IMDH is “scream therapy.” Sure, it’s visceral, emotional, real…but do we really gain anything from it? Hell, did Omar/Santiago?? And if so, what do they want us to get out of their shared pain?
If anything, I feel more voyeuristic reading this book than any other we’ve encountered this semester. Again, what’s the point? Well, according to the interview that Kristen linked to: “In the times we are living in we all feel that despair and isolation.” I’m just not sure I agree with Santiago re. that–sure, it’s one response to the world, but I just don’t think we all need to traffic in the vomitous bleakness of Omar’s world to deal with the screwed up nature of the world around us.
Along those lines, when I read the first few pages, I had hoped for something rather pointed and purposeful after the inflammatory rhetoric of “a big fuck you to the department of (in)human services of illinois eat shit and die maggots” on the acknowledgments page. Maybe the book would be a critique of government bureaucracy, or advocate for some sort of humanitarian change…
But by the end of the book, I had more sympathy for said human services than I did for Omar/Santiago. Omar, after all, is a perpetrator of his abuse in a way that Jimmy Corrigan only fantasized about…Regardless, that, my friends, is a failure of narrative.
Sure, at a certain level, I do feel pity for Omar. He is obviously a conflicted, rather wretched character with a seriously troubled past. But I’m not sure that my glimpse inside the confines of his psychosis will help me to help him–or anyone like him. In the meantime, I don’t get any other commentary from my peek inside his head than that “primal scream,” nothing else compelling as you note.
And that’s not enough for me.
and by “Kristen,” I meant “Kristine,” for the record! ha.
Thanks for the correction. I’m pretty attached to my legacy of “the girl who posted that link on the Twitter.”
Phineas,
In many important ways, I agree with you. For much of the text, I was waiting for this “darkest hour” to come; instead, I had to wade through a much longer and arduous period of darkness: Omar’s entire life.
After initially rejecting the text as a waste of time — and while I may defend parts of it, I still feel this is the least compelling work we’ve read in this class — I came to the conclusion that perhaps this feeling of unease, of outright contempt for Omar, and other such similar emotions may have been the point. “In My Darkest Hour” succeeds, and ironically this may be its
[Hit “publish” by accident, can’t seem to figure out how to delete the previous comment, cut, paste, and start over — so, apologies]
…biggest failing, in forcing the reader to exist within Omar’s narcissistic, fragmented, grotesque perception of the world. Sadly, getting us into Omar’s shoes and behind his eyes, Santiago feels he has succeeded, as the lack of story, plot, character growth and development, and many of our fellow classmates’ unhappiness with the work demonstrates. As Josh said, it’s a primal scream, and that’s all.
Omar in many ways feels like little more than a vehicle for his condition, and the world seems little more than a sounding board for this, to steal Josh’s words again, primal scream to reverberate off of. The text is a work of distortion, fragmentation, and confusion, not a work where a mentally ill person drives a narrative, and the lack of anything other than a character study of a mental illness and a mentally ill man makes all the strengths of “In My Darkest Hour” work against itself — almost how Omar constantly acts against himself, causing and perpetuating much of his own unhappiness in an almost compulsive way.
I thought I had something more positive to say, but I appear to be mistaken. Every time I tried to highlight a strength of the text, my frustrations with the work came to the surface. I have lingering issues with “Asterios Polyp,” but very much enjoyed the text; I enjoyed aspects of “In My Darkest Hour,” but can’t seem to fit these strengths into a framework capable of sustaining and supporting the graphic novel.
Lars, what did you appreciate about the text? Maybe that’s where we should take this discussion…
I certainly appreciated the, err, strength of the emotion…and I felt like I got some modicum of understanding into why Omar is the way he is w/the flashback to his own abuse…and judging by the way the women in his life interacted with him, he had to have at least some kind of personal charm (right?)