Narrating Aging and Death in Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

Abstract

In her graphic memoir, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (2014), Roz Chast chronicles disturbing issues of aging and death by recalling that of her own parents. Using an ironical narrative technique in the form of comics to look back on the last years of her parents, Chast not only expands the territory of graphic novels, but also redefines the conventional radius of life writings. Unlike the mainstream life writings that primarily focus on public figures' prime times, Chast, in her narrative of conscious aging, articulates what it means to be frail and old That is, Chast, by employing texts, images, and photos among others, probes into the end of one's life through the painful lens of observing her parents' death. With death looming in front of them, her parents recognize the mortality of their own life and gradually become Being-towards-death They change abstract time into an opportunity to be fully responsible for their own existence. As the only caregiver for her dying parents and an artist representing their last days with an ethnographic gesture, Chast confesses that she could experience death only through the demise of her parents. To explain the different conceptions of time represented in this graphic memoir, critical discourses on life, death, and time by Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas have been used. One's old age inevitably accompanies illness, disability, and eventually death; Chast in her graphic memoir, however, argues that this period allows us to reconsider life's circle anew by expanding the frontiers of life narratives. Copyright © 2022 ELLAK.