Luke Healy Americana - graphic travel memoir

Context/genre/mode

Healy uses the graphic memoir form as a way of reflecting both visually and in written form on his experience of a cultural phenomenon (feelings of alienation that he links to the Irish struggle for economic stability, and the migrant's search for cultural identity) as well as a very personal one (grief about the death of his grandfather). Elements of different genres are intertwined: social/historical commentary, with almost academic register ("Generation Emigration", "the 2008 global financial crisis", "the Great Famine", "in the '50s..."), establishes the writer's view of his own experiences sitting in a wider sociological context. Travelogue genre seen in key tropes (geographical markers, visual description, anecdotal detail), and memoir deals in lexis of relationships and emotion

Audience and purpose

The text is thus both informative (see declaratives, "The legacy of mass emigration still lives on..."), expressive ("Now, I don't care...") and engaging ("Hey, deer" - see image), aimed at readers who might for any reason find resonance with the experiences, events and emotions recorded and illustrated here.

Lexical motifs

link the superficially disconnected segments together: one is alienation ("unmoored", "outside", "Privately, I despaired", "I lose Centerfold...I catch him...he passes me out again...", "...feel so removed"), another abandonment ("lost", "left", "departure", "leaving", "emigration", "wakes" as "ritual"/"process")

Common, colloquial register mixed with more elevated, Latinate lexis

("we bump fists", "I hadn't want to skip", "we raise a glass") to ("arcane paraphernalia") and figurative language ("mountain itself soars high", "hulking majesty of the High Sierras") typically when the writer wants to convey the travellers' sense of bewilderment or awe about the unfamiliar world represented in the images (the shop, the landscape).

Short sentences

seeming deliberately to eliminate the possibility of expansion and emotion ("And Mile 55 drifts apart again.", "My dad and brother are also awake."), but sometimes short sentences contain striking emotional revelation ("I feel myself uncoil.", "It stabs at me that I'm not there. I should be there") - here, metaphor helps us infer the feelings the writer doesn't fully specify

Observations: visual imagery, literal description and irony grounded in assumed knowledge and cultural allusion

Visual imagery is sometimes reinforced lexically in the word panels, as if to invite the reader in to vicarious immersion in the experience - observations range from literal description ("The trail runs in a big loop around Mt. Shasta itself") to irony grounded in assumed knowledge and cultural allusion ("I am hiking through a Disney movie"

Interactional: Reported dialogue (speech bubbles)

often reflecting spontaneous speech ("'Hey, um. Do you know how many crystal shops are in this town?' 'Let me see...one...two...three...'", "'We've gotta coordinate better...'"); by sharing the precise words of these seemingly banal interactions, the writer invites the reader to dwell on their significance and infer something about them.

Interactional: Directly reported speech in the diagesis

("'I see butterflies on trail every day'", I say, hoping not to dismiss her sentimentality too rudely'" / "'You're just eating the eating the salt on my skin', I say to it, like a dope'"); here, the narrator can share his own feelings about the utterance, offering a more explicit emotional dimension to the dialogue.

Interactional: First person narrative

is used to offer a personal and subjective viewpoint ( "I applied for over one hundred jobs...I got one interview. They went with someone else."

Interactional: Internal dialouge

with questions ("I'd cried over the USA and returned again and again, and what it had got me?" / "Why couldn't I be happy there?"), sometimes bleeding in to fictional dialogue with an imagined challenger ("Purists would scoff...if somebody wants to take issue...let them walk thirteen hundred miles through snow and desert to tell me...", "I don't care...I say it defiantly to myself"), which captures humorously the way the mind works when alone for prolonged periods.

Interactional: Intergration of familiar cliches

("There are more Irish living outside of Ireland..." / "If you love something...") - they are simultaneously mocked ("my dad repeated often" / "that stupid phrase...cheesy") and also implicitly validated by being re-voiced here.

Interactional: Graphological features used to signify phonological effects

the hand-written style for paralinguistic features ("heff heff", "SIGH") and onomatopoeic features ("Beep Beep" makes these non-verbal sounds. Repeating of very similar images (see the tent sequence on pg 45, with only subtle alterations between illustrations) also helps to emphasise absence of sound over a period of time

Structural: Chapter title

The chapter title acts as a geographical marker, and the epigraph as a thematic one, reinforcing the sense that the travel narrative ("Oregon" and the emotional journey ("Stop wanting everything") are intertwined.

Structural: Extract means that some details require inference;

there is a nomenclature around the "PCT" journey: "Mile 55" is the "crew" with whom the narrator has overlapped at times ("since Mammoth"), with sobriquets (Centerfold, Griz, Craftsman) that hint at the kind of elective anonymity that an extended hike can offer (theme of alienation again?

Structural: Non-chronoligcal approach and non-sequiturs

s (unexpected transitions in which events don't follow logically - see page 40 - the arrival of "Mile 55" - and page 44 - the unexplained appearance of "the butterfly") may reflect the writer's own disjointed thoughts and the tendency for memories to intrude unexpectedly ("I think about my grandad as I hike").

Structural: Temporal markers

range from the precise and time-specific ("two years earlier") for life stages to much more general indicators of time passing on the trek ("After a little while", "The next morning", "soon" - and even just the visual illustration of nightfall - pg 45), perhaps to suggest the vaguer sense of time's passage when trekking.

Structural: Opening of the chapter is written in past tense

remind us that these are reflections held in mind during the PCT trek ("In the books and plays we studied..."); in the travelogue, present tense gives the diagesis immediacy ("...the trail is much easier"..."I stay still and let the butterfly eat") but this also broadens out to an abstract present tense that allows the

narrator to expand unexpectedly on profound emotional truths: "I clutch and cling so tight as to crush...to people, and ideas, and identity..." - three-part list heightens the revelation.