Nate Powell's 'Swallow Me Whole' Takes Reader on a Journey into the Mind

Nate Powell’s acclaimed graphic novel Swallow Me Whole tells the story of brother and sister twins trapped in a world of hallucinations.

The first scene in the novel shows the twins with their parents going into the hospital. If there’s one thing Powell is a master of, it’s using negative space to impact the reader. Here we see an almost entirely empty space, the characters seemingly floating into a doorway, over which looms eerily the medical cross with a snake. The symbolism is medicinal, reptilian, and devilish all at once, and it foreshadows all the symbolically resonant images which are littered throughout the text. The reader is drawn in to follow these characters on their ominous path, waiting for the empty space to be filled by their story.

Powell uses the comic form to show schizophrenia in ways that can’t be done in traditional literature, or even really in film. Ruth’s hallucinations, in particular, as opposed to her brother’s, fill the reader’s view. She is the main focalizing agent of the story, and the world is drawn as it is warped by her mind. There is a wonderful ambiguity in these focalizations. In the image below, a shadowy figure lurks behind the twins. Is this a representation of Ruth’s vision of the world, that what’s behind her is less important - just like the scribbled lines in word balloons that represent words Ruth doesn’t hear? Or is this a hallucination of hers? Or perhaps it’s a hallucination of her grandmother’s. It could even be one they share. These questions are all up in the air when this image occurs, and even by the end of the text they can’t be answered completely - only more questions are raised.

Swallow Me Whole is a brilliant example of how the graphic medium can explore classic literary themes. Many of the instances of hallucination images represent a loss of identity. We see that in the scribbled figure above, and in the image below of Ruth being literally overcome by her bug swarm hallucinations. In the top image her body is the swarm, and below the swarm silhouettes her body. Ruth is fractured and consumed, the swarm takes her over but the swarm also identifies her; it is part and parcel of who she is.

 

In another series of images, Ruth speaks to her grandmother at length - really for the first time - and as her grandmother speaks, her face transforms into her younger self. This is another example of ambiguity - is this another hallucination? Is it Ruth’s or her grandmother’s? Or is it just an artistic device, like a flashback within the panel, and a way of showing that Ruth is connecting to her grandmother’s past? Really, it’s all these things. 

Through these sort of devices, Powell plays with the barrier between reality and fiction, between objective truth and subjective experiences. The scenes of the grandmother’s phantom, shown below in a pair of two-page sequences, are another example of ambiguity. Is this really a fantasy novel, where ghosts are real? Is the grandmother dreaming, or hallucinating? How do her phantoms interact with Ruth’s swarms? Powell’s brilliant use of black space - an entire page, even - emphasizes a void which can’t be filled, a gap in picking apart truth from fiction.

These images also isolate us as the characters are isolated, caught up in a world of images which may as well, for the rest of the world, be nothing but empty space. We see that again in the isolated picture of Ruth’s grandmother, with a darkened face surrounded by white, and sparse, tiny words sprawled across the page.

Going into detail about the use of braided imagery in Swallow Me Whole would take enough text to fill a book - but suffice it to say that the connections between this families fantasies and the world they inhabit are endless. We see this most clearly when Ruth’s compulsively-rearranged jars mirror, on a single page, the funeral of her grandmother. Ruth’s compulsive ordering and the fantasies surrounding it helps her order her world, and her experiences in that world.

Anyone who tries to figure out the objective truths in Swallow Me Whole, who tries to piece together the story world ‘as it really is’, will be nothing but frustrated. In Swallow Me Whole, the story is always phenomenological; it is always in the mind, both of the reader and its characters.