if it were any more real it’d be fiction

Although Epileptic generally follows a timeline from childhood, the narrative is non-linear as B. repeatedly interjects his telling of the past with present concerns. B’s interruptions from the 1990’s are used more or less to explain the origins of the comic, the shaping of particular symbols, the revelation of main themes, and inconsistencies in memory. Examples:

- pgs. 21-31; B’s mother and acquaintances narrate the horrors of the Algerian and World Wars which will develop the metaphor of Fafou’s/David’s battle against Jean-Christophe’s disease

- pgs. 94-96; B’s mother argues for an alternative history of her grandmother against the alcoholic figure B. has provided

- pgs. 160 and 168 point out that the enraged David illustrated by B. is unrecognizable according to his father’s and sister’s memory

- pgs. 199-200; through visual rhymes B. links his dreams of saving his grandfather and brother with his mother’s newly understood dreams of saving her son

- pg. 212; B’s conversation with his mother almost confirms what Fafou/David has suspected all along in the childhood storyline—that Jean Christophe chose to hide behind his epilepsy.

B. did not need to tell the story this way, but his choice to conflict his multiple timelines is the choice to underscore one of the biggest problems of autobiographical writing: the impossibility of expressing the feelings of the past without the influence of the present. Epileptic reminds us that remembering and writing/illustrating memories are not the same activity. Disregarding chronology as the author steps out the childhood storyline to draw attention to the storyline of Epileptic’s composition serves B’s purpose of analyzing and not just recording experience.

I guess that’s all fairly obvious, but things get really crazy at the end when illustrations of B’s and Jean-Christophe’s dreams and visions overtake all of the previous timelines. Identifying with his brother enables B. to imagine what his brother imagines. So not only are there multiple temporalities that confuse what “really” happened, but B. increasingly tells parts of the story from his brother’s voice. Examples:

- the gutter style on pgs. 296-302 derives from Jean-Christophe’s body instead of the typical straightedge, implying that this sequence has to do with Jean-Christophe’s point of view. But the sequence really narrates B’s assumptions of Jean-Christophe’s wants, delights, and vision of escape. In reality, no one can really know if Jean-Christophe’s mind is organized enough to envision escape as B. has.

- pg. 350; “Behold my prophecies for the year 1997” is a 2 page spread showing Jean-Christophe’s visions in Jean-Christophe’s first-person voice. Again, they are not really Jean-Christophe’s visions but B’s imagining of those visions. That the pages are stylistically comparable to the 2 page spread of “David B’s head at the end of the 70’s” on pg. 278—which B. definitely has more authority to render—indicates the extent to which B. feels he can speak for Jean-Christophe.

- the epilogue; it is necessarily within a dream sequence, but by the end B. and Jean Christophe are portrayed as equally credible narrators in dialog

B. cannot really know what Jean-Christophe is thinking or how his brother would respond to the questions he asks in the epilogue. He cannot know the extent to which Jean-Christophe “chose” his disease (pg. 341). The point that B. is making (and I think he makes it beautifully) by confusing multiples timelines, interjecting alternate interpretations, and adding these unknowable perspectives is that none of it hinders the truth of his story (and for these reasons I disagree with some posters arguing the ending is facile and tacked-on). The veracity of events holds only as much significance as the author prefers since imagined events like the dreams he remembers and his interpretations of his brother’s visions have just as much impact on B’s behavior and his understanding of himself, if not more. These imagined visions do not function any differently than true memory does; they still recover the past with an aim of explaining the present. Wolk (pg. 141) says it best: “What he is actually doing is guiding readers …into the profoundly different way he perceives the world, partly through the specific experiences that led him there and partly by representing everything not as his eye apprehends it but as his consciousness alters it.” The highly stylized nature of autobiographies told through the graphic novel medium highlight the fact that autobiographies are not subject to historical accuracy, but are expositions and arguments for of the existence of unique structures upon which a unique person is made. The structure B. argues for in Epileptic is simply the co-reliance between himself and Jean-Christophe. The damage control resulting from his brotherly relations actually emphasizes B’s counter-intuitive dependency on Jean-Christophe; it’s not simply that past experiences like moving around macrobiotic communes have influenced who B. is today, but that B. wholly identified the characteristics of his brother and relentlessly shaped himself to be the opposite: productive, fighting, and surviving against Jean-Christophe’s idleness, surrender, and multiple deaths. B. converts Jean-Christophe’s debilitating epilepsy into a generative force that empowers him to draw and create fictions, realities, and interpretations of all kinds of faiths that exist in between. B’s weird reliance on Jean-Christophe to define his identity through opposition is what makes them, for better or worse, inseparable.