The lamp's imaginings

Trying to follow this graphic novel is very difficult. Sometimes, the reader can get a little confused between what is reality and what is imagination. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth uses this switching back and forth between what is going on in Jimmy's mind as to where he came from versus the things he discovers in life to show how Jimmy thinks and what he thinks of himself, and make the reader think about how he thinks as well. The page in which Jimmy's grandfather is imagining playing with a projector lamp and shining it out his window is probably the best example of this theme in the novel. "A seamless stream of predictable pictures pointed at the moon only occasionally cut by the knife edge of a leaf or a chimney, a bird, an aircraft or a man falling, falling, falling from a very tall building" (Ware). This image of a seamless stream of predictable thought is how much of the novel functions, in that Jimmy's mind is constantly thinking, producing images that are more or less predictable, but the reader still has yet to reach the point where all of those thoughts, however dark they may be, hit the ground, like the man falling who never seems to reach earth. "Each successive slice of light revealing one earlier event of the evening's entertainment, but still never quite getting up to the exact moment that the lamp was lit in the first place" (Ware). This image of working in reverse is much like Jimmy's own struggle to understand himself based on the past he should have had had his father been in his life.

The disjointedness of these images, which flash through the beam of light to reveal a moment in time, are connected by that same beam of light. Jimmy's mind works in the same way, in that he is using the beam of light, or the reunion and connection with his father, to try to understand his past, the point of origin of the light. He sees glimpses of where his life came from, but does not yet fully understand truly where it all originates. The beam of light is his existence, both from his own mind and from his experiences. This image of the beam of light makes the reader think about his own past, as to where the light of his existence originates. The images flashing through that beam are the thoughts and ideas that make the reader who he is, but like Jimmy, the reader cannot remember the first thought he had, like the point of origin of the beam.