Childhood In Huvid Small's Stitches By David Small

Instead of the traditional and mainstream verbal memoir, David Small chose to confine his autobiological novel, Stitches, within a comic medium that details the darkest periods of his childhood as a prelude to healing. Small demonstrates the rough parts that shaped his life with a truthful outlook on his childhood and the relationships between himself and his dysfunctional family by encoding these moments into vividly drawn emotions and sensations . Small experienced traumatic things both physical and psychological, yet despite this, he was able to work through it. This way of using graphic text was David’s take on using literature as an outlet to deal with traumatic experiences.
On the outside, David’s family is just like any other ordinary

David does not have much interaction with kids his own age. David learns other ways to entertain himself such as by imagining himself inside Alice in Wonderland, and putting on a yellow towel to transfer into someone else in an alternative reality from his trauma. However, David’s personality alienates him from other children, making his behavior odd in their eyes and teasing him (Small 60). David founds himself an outcast, and little to no solace and connection in his social life. Due to his poor health and the treatment he received from other kids, he spends most of his time indoors, and finds an escape in drawing. Withdrawing from the real world into his drawing, David finds himself a world where he belongs that brings him genuine joy. The complete rejection he receives from the real world makes him find another world where he has the freedom to be is expressed in the panel when he dives into his drawings, illustrating the importance of drawing is to his life and what it will mean in the future (Small 62). Nothing in this panel is holding David back as his disappears into this alternate

David explores in his own emotions, contemplating whether to confront his mother, ultimately gives him the will to go visit his dying mother and say one last goodbye to the person he could never be close to. Betty, too weak to speak, and David, lost for words, are drawn with no captions, expressing how their relationship was through their entire lives. The scene illustrates the power shift in the relationship with David no longer looking up to his mother, but rather looking down at her. He reaches out to his mother, caressing her face, and a tear sheds from her eye, suggesting how emotional this goodbye