When Literary Devices Weaken -or- The Literary Journalism that Chose to Echo

On first read, the prologue in Safe Area Gorazde introduced me to Sacco as a journalist and placed me in the heart of the town - character and setting all at once. When cycling back through pages of SAG, however, the prologue hits me hard. The "Real Truth" becomes heavily weighted as a device of Sacco's narrative, almost as if Sacco is heading off questions of "truth" and "non-fiction" that are inevitable. By opening the novel with the shady "counterfeit" (see Justin’s post “Truthfully…”), Sacco sets up an interesting juxtaposition for the "real truth" he's about to detail. And this is where my problem lies – if Sacco's "real truth" is as such, why would he need to employ a literary device to help characterize it as true? Why would a journalist use the first two pages of a report to spotlight nonfiction vs. fiction and the issue of reliability if he knows that his account is a truthful report? Sacco knew that “real truth” would be at issue in SAG’s creative nonfiction form, but his attempt to dismiss the concerns in the prologue only makes the pages that follow more questionable.

Further, Sacco depicts the stranger in manner of the hard-boiled – a largely fictionalized genre which fits easier into the world of comics than the real-life Sacco does himself. In contrast to Sacco and the townspeople that befriend Sacco, the movements of the stranger are stiff and mechanical (consider scenes like 24.3, 61.3 or 102.2) and help separate the “fictional” stranger from the “real” people in the prologue. Add in the line that the stranger’s “dreams told him” (ii.4) he wouldn’t be injured in the war, and the stranger becomes an overly-fictionalized, dreamlike device who serves to balance truth. But, again, is it necessary for “real” non-fiction to define itself against fiction?

When considering the prologue as a literary device, it’s necessary to consider the rest of SAG’s construction, too. Repetition of themes, focus on lifestyles and consumerism, structure of the narrative, etc. all define SAG as a creative non-fiction or literary journalism piece, rather than a clear-cut journalist account. And while this is something the reader knows from the start given the graphic novel format, it’s interesting how many of these devices weaken SAG as a whole and lessen the impact of Sacco’s message.

Given this, I as a reader still find SAG extremely powerful – the images and story resonate in my mind in a way that a traditional journalist account of Gorazde could not. And as Sacco foresaw the question of “real truth,” I wonder if he was mostly concerned with my praise – that is, did Sacco want to resonate more than prove reliability?