Transformations
Whether it’s an endearing transformation, as with his bird-grandfather or the cat-like Master N, or something terrifying, like the disease or, on many occasions, Jean-Christophe himself, David B. has a tendency to transform and dehumanize anything and everything. He does so to represent particularly strong feelings. Master N may look to the young David like a big cat, but his inhumanity also seems to draw attention to the fact that he is the only one really able to make a difference with Jean-Christophe. In comparison, doctors and gurus represented as human consistently fail.
David transforms his brother on many occasions. Even as Jean-Christophe does make a pretty drastic physical transformation in reality, he becomes something else altogether in moments of particular rage—his face lines in black like war paint, his eyes suddenly wide, for example, on page 273—in sharp contrast to his usual glazed look. It’s as terrifying and heartbreaking as one could imagine it must be, to see a loved one make such a bizarre and unfathomable—almost supernatural—transformation. And David B. himself transforms, many times, especially when he is forced to, to suit up in armor and weapons, to become a warrior, in defense of his own mind. He also transforms in anger. On page 267, he looks leering and skeletal while he lets the thought of murder pass through his mind. On the same page, a black and hulking Jean-Christophe threatens him with a hatchet. When he leaps out of the bath to combat his brother, David B. changes to match. It’s a scary picture of what his resentment for Jean-Christophe, and his disease, can do to David. In fact, the terrible effect they have on him is probably one of the things he most resents.
For all the feelings, both of love and resentment that David has for his parents, however, neither of them ever transform. Early on (and many times later on) he shows the family being carried on the back of the disease. He seems to understand his parent’s helplessness in the face of much of it. But it’s clear he does hold some anger towards his parents for their own gullibility and utter devotion to alternative-medicine techniques. The adult conversations he depicts with his mother seem to point to the fact that he has come to terms with much of that anger. But I wonder if he is leaving some of it out in retrospect. Perhaps at one point he would have drawn his parents undergoing some form of transformation. Or, perhaps, parents are simply unchangeable.
If David is haunted by monsters and transformations, he is also comforted by them. He may eventually decide to leave his three friends, the Devil, the Dead Man, and the Cat behind, but the personification of everything is what allows him to put to paper a story which might be unexplainable as a collection of words and ideas. Epileptic captures a viewpoint of childhood, the obsessions with weapons and violence and monsters perfectly. The personification of every feeling would be absolutely impossible to capture in any other form.
