Sacco in Safe Area Gorazde

I found Safe Area Gorazde very interesting and highly disturbing. The stories told by Sacco reveal the true brutality of the Bosnian war, in which neighbors burned down each other’s homes and committed other unthinkable atrocities. It was somewhat surreal to see the cartoon version of Sacco himself among the Bosnian victims; he seemed slightly out of place in their destroyed country. It also seemed strange to me that Sacco was in such a dangerous war zone, but I guess that’s the job of a war journalist. As for the question of why Sacco would draw himself into the book, my main theory is that he wanted to tell the story of his trip to Bosnia as accurately as possible. We know of Sacco that he only included direct quotes from people, refusing to paraphrase any dialogue for the book. This decision indicates his desire for complete accuracy; he clearly didn’t want any of his book to seem fictional or invented. It therefore seems natural that Sacco would want to include himself in the narrative, because that choice reflects the truest representation of his trip to Bosnia. Obviously Sacco himself was present while listening to people’s stories of the war and learning about Bosnian history, so for him to leave himself out of the narrative would involve a slight distortion of fact. As a result, he chose to include himself in order to demonstrate to the reader the events of the narrative in the most complete, accurate way possible.

My other reflection on Sacco’s decision to draw himself into the story is that he wanted to give his readers a main character/narrator to identify with as he charted the dangerous territory of the Bosnian war. I think Sacco realized that many American readers would feel lost in a story about a war in a foreign country that they had never visited, and thus he chose to present himself within the narrative in order to provide some consistency and familiarity in the story. It seemed that he wanted readers to be able to identify with him as both narrator and main character, hoping that this would create a recognizable element in an otherwise jarring book. One thing that I observed while reading is that Sacco draws himself as much less realistic and much more cartoony than the other characters, which (if we look back to Scott McCloud) suggests that Sacco wanted readers to be able to identify with his less specific, more general representation of himself. While all of his other characters had very specific features, Sacco just looks like a short guy with glasses and big lips. And sure, that description doesn’t fit all possible readers, but it applies to more people than a very detailed drawing would. So I felt that Sacco wanted to draw in his readers by drawing himself as he explored the horrifying world of Bosnia, bringing them into the narrative by showing his own experience and hoping that they would identify with it.