Drawing, Writing, and Junior’s Cartoons Theme Analysis

One unique aspect of Absolutely True Diary is the way that images are incorporated into the text. Junior is an aspiring cartoonist who uses his drawings to tell his story, and the cartoons work throughout the novel in several different and important ways. Sometimes they are integrated seamlessly with the written narrative, providing dialogue or visual information that isn’t shown elsewhere; for instance, the moment when Junior throws his geometry book and breaks Mr. P.’s nose is shown in a picture rather than told in a sentence, as if Junior’s feelings are too strong to articulate in words. Some reveal Junior’s attitude toward other characters; he takes special care in sketching his friends Rowdy, Gordy, and Penelope, and these portraits help to characterize both the artist and the subjects. Still others, like “Junior Gets to School” or “Who My Parents Would Have Been If Somebody Had Paid Attention to Their Dreams,” are like self-contained diagrams or infographics; they explain what’s going on in the text in a different, visual way. As Junior explains, “I draw because I want to pay attention to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.”

At the beginning of the novel, Junior sees his cartoons, and his skill as an artist, as his one chance of leaving the reservation: “tiny little lifeboats” in a world of “broken dams and floods.” In a similar way, his older sister Mary once dreamed of writing romance novels; Junior sees it as tragic that she gives up on those dreams after she graduates high school. Words become even more important to him after he gets to Reardan, and his new friend Gordy teaches him to read seriously and joyfully—an approach that, Junior notes, should apply both to books and life. Mary’s romance novels are more complicated, though. When she suddenly gets married, moves to Montana, and begins writing a memoir, her life seems to be unfolding like something out of one of her stories—until she dies in a tragic, senseless accident, suggesting that the possibility of a better life might sometimes be just a fantasy and that the connection between books and life cannot be so straightforward.