Category: Reading Summaries

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman takes the traditional coming-of-age of age story and flips it on its head. While the book is filled to the brim with characters symbolically “walking the line between life and death,” dead celebrities (ghouls) trying to eat living children, and a two-thousand-year-old Roman ghost, The Graveyard Book also appeals to themes and theories, namely, social connection theory. This theory refers to the experience of feeling close and connected to others and is dictated by the quality and number of meaningful relationships one has with family, friends, and acquaintances.

The story follows a young boy named Nobody, or Bod for short. Bod has no human parents because they were killed by a man named Jack when Bod was about a year old. As such he lives the first decade of his life being raised by Ms. Owens, a ghost from the graveyard, and Silas, a being that walks the line between life and death. Living as a quasi-ghost was difficult for Bod; He was not allowed to leave the graveyard for most of his childhood, resulting in him ever only making a single human friend — Scarlett. Despite having several ghostly beings that would gladly call him family, Bod’s lack of real human contact made him feel incredibly isolated. Unfortunately Silas, the man who acted as a strong fatherly figure for Bod, could not quench the feeling of isolation Bod experienced. Bod explains, “…he wanted to embrace his guardian (Silas)… but the action was unthinkable… There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas” (Gaiman 82). Nevertheless, Bod did have the Owens family to turn to if he needed someone, but they were only two people.

                This dynamic is where the concept of social connection theory comes into play. Many of Bod’s tendencies can be linked to this because, according to this theory, “When we’re cared for as children, we’re more likely to have healthy, secure attachments as we get older” (Berkeley 2017). As said by BE, “Bod’s childhood was lacking these connections, which is why he felt isolated and unappeased in the graveyard.”

In his article, “Unremembering the Forgotten,” Tim Sherratt explores the importance of data, its accessibility, and by what means it persists. Sherratt targets the political nature of ruling over information, arguing that the prohibition of public access to data is a means by which to control a populous. He challenges the notion of memory “because [he] wants to unsettle what it means to remember,” and believes it necessary “to go beyond the listing of names and the cataloging on files to develop modes of access that are confusing, challenging, inspiring, uncomfortable, and sometimes creepy” (Sherratt).  These statements are contextualized using the history of Australian Aboriginals, whose relevance, he argues, has been blotted out by mainstream events that garner more attention. One such instance is when the Australian government invested upwards of half-a-billion dollars to commemorate their participation in World War I but failed to address the intense systematic racism present in ‘White Australia.’ The Australian Government continued its lack of mentioning the relevance of white supremacy in their country all the way until the writing of Sherratt’s article, in which Sherratt data mines much of the hidden information. By preventing the data from being released, the government maintained power over the Aboriginals, essentially controlling their ability to “exist” in the public eye.

I strongly support Sherratt’s views on access. The fact that the only way he obtained the information on Australian Natives was by using was is essentially hacking indicates that system that is inherently broken. If we cannot obtain basic information about someone because a government is hiding it from us, perhaps exempting military personnel or high-ranking officials, then it is undeniable there is an untold agenda being fulfilled. I believe it to be necessary, in some instances, for data to be seized. Doing so WE states, is “powerfully subversive and threatening to the institutions and generally accepted narratives that we have today.” We should feel no shame lopping off the overreaching arms of governments and corporations as they rapidly gain more control over data, whether it be through hacking, protest, or, most importantly, voting.

In the beginning of Numbered Lives, Wernimont summarizes the ways in which quantum media, media that “counts, quantifies, and enumerates,” has been transformative and reflective of Anglo-American culture, and how the quantification of human data is heavily influenced by race, gender, and the way one died (Wernimont 2). Among the most notable examples of this is the story of “Saint Savior,” the nickname given to a 17th-century woman who hanged herself in a church. According to Wernimont, she may have done so because of the high likelihood for her existence to be entirely forgotten. A notable death-via-suicide in a sacred place would guarantee her a death record. I find it interesting that despite this, her identity was almost entirely forgotten. Her real name was smudged from history, and her existence was tied solely to a newspaper column titled “hang’d and made away with themselves” (Wernimont 37), which was then included in more generalized documentation of the dead called “Mortality Bills.” Nevertheless, her identity is more concrete and detailed than most of the dead of her time because it includes both her gender and “the agent of her death (herself)” (Wernimont 37). While I initially found this to be reminiscent of some modern-day science fiction novels in that human lives are disregarded a nothing more than a number, it seems to be just as prevalent in modern-day insurance company practices. The oversimplification of data to identify trends that modern insurance companies do follows suit with what Wernimont states in the introduction, “Tracking and quantifying human life, whether motivated by corporate, state, community, or individual reasons, is intimately linked to the ways in which we record and enumerate human death” (Wernimont 2). If we take Wernimont’s words to heart, it is not hard to see that we may be heading back to an age of oversimplification. With the current rise data collection by insurance companies and horror stories like those surrounding Ancestry.com, it’s no wonder XN is concerned with the situation, stating “If our deaths are just seen as numbers, the impact we have on society can get lost in everyone else’s numbers” (XN).

“Jokes That Follow Mass-mediated Disasters In A Global Electronic Age” by Christie Davies and “The Death-Humor Paradox” by Peter Narvaéz provide a detailed explanation of the ways dark humor has manifested itself in modern society and touches on many of my own conflicting views on dark humor and how I have interacted with the genre throughout my life. Beginning as early as second or third grade, jokes about celebrity deaths were already circulating. I distinctly remember a day in the second grade in which my friend Matthew said a joke about him killing John F. Kennedy because he stole his lollipop. Weird kid. Nevertheless, those kinds of jokes were relatively tame. Davies explains that “sick humor” was scarce if not nonexistent before the influence of widespread media, and in my life, this could not be truer. By the time I was in middle school, the social media phenomenon known as Vine was in full swing, and with it came some of the first instances of dark humor going viral. One of the most notable ones was a video of a baby spinning a jack-in-the-box, however, when the “jack” finally emerged, it cut to a plane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I have yet to comprehend what made the clip funny, yet at the time, I laughed. Maybe it was because I was immature and “edgy”, or maybe it was the shock factor of seeing such a horrendous thing happen. Regardless, I struggle to understand how finding humor in national tragedy occurs. Even in middle school when I asked, “why is this so funny?” I usually responded, “I don’t know. It just is.”  Narváez ultimately decides that despite the apparent nonsensicality of finding humor in death, “it appears to be a human universal, a technique for communicating and dealing with the enigma of our precarious mortality” (Narváez 11).  While I would love for this to be the answer to my question, I struggle to find internal conflict pertaining to my mortality manifesting itself within me. Perhaps I have yet to contemplate how fragile my mortality truly is.