Daytripper

Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “41”

Forty-one-year-old Brás runs frantically in and out of the house, helping his pregnant wife Ana to the car as she goes into labor with their child. On their way out the door, they ignore a call to their landline. The voicemail picks up, and Brás’s mother says something has happened to his father.

At the hospital, Brás goes outside to call his wife’s doctor and is surprised to find his mother outside as well. She tells him that his father has died. He returns to see that Ana’s contractions have stopped. He gently tells her the news.

Several days later, Brás and his family hold a funeral. Given Benedito’s status as a cultural icon, the press and media descend upon them. Brás feels alone, and despite his experience as an obituary writer, he finds himself stunned that no matter what is going on in the world, people keep dying.

After the burial, a woman approaches Brás. He vaguely recognizes her from an event his father hosted many years ago. When he goes back to the hospital for Ana, the woman appears outside again. She begs Brás to speak to her about Benedito, but he yells at her that he is dead. She tells him her mother has Alzheimer’s. It is implied that this woman may have been another one of Benedito’s children but born out of wedlock. Brás asks her which of his books are her favorite, but she’s never read any of them. Upset, he tries to hide his feelings from his mother and wife in order to be strong for them.

Ana asks him to retrieve “Emilia,” a music box back at their home. Brás returns with it and learns that his wife has given birth to a baby boy. His mother asks Brás to return her home again to get the baby gown he was given as a child so the new baby can wear it, and Brás snaps that he’s already missed the birth of his son. But he goes to his mother’s home anyway and finds himself overwhelmed by the presence of his newly deceased father. As he encounters his father’s typewriter and Brás’s own book beside it, he has a fatal heart attack. In his mini-obituary, he is remembered for finally having “gotten it together” (104) yet dying from the difficulty of losing his father and the fear of stepping into his shoes.

Chapter 5 Summary: “11”

Eleven-year-old Brás tells the story of how he earned the nickname “Little Miracle”: He was born in the midst of a citywide blackout. His mother claims that when he came into the world he brought the light back with him. This makes him feel as though he had super powers, although his cousins don’t believe the story.

Brás would play with these cousins at his grandparents’ ranch. Benedito loves the ranch because it allows him time to write, although Aurora, Brás’s mother, works hard to look after everyone. Brás reminisces about his too-big family with too many names, as well as his grandmother’s cooking. Benedito’s father claimed his own tree, which he sat beneath to gather his best ideas. Brás loved spending his time there and figured “life was harmless at the ranch” (116).

He overhears his family members talking about their younger days and realizes that adults do indeed grow older and were even once children themselves. This changes the way he views his cousins, and he notes that “the seasons were changing inside of him” (119). Brás experiences his first kiss during a game of hide and go seek beneath his father’s tree. Even when returning home to São Paulo, Brás is excited to understand and explore his freedom. We see Brás flying kites at the ranch as well as outside his home in São Paulo.

The scene then cuts to Brás’s sister being called out of school. Aurora picks her up while crying. Alongside a mini-obituary, we see that Brás’s kite was caught in a telephone wire, which electrocuted him. Mirroring Aurora’s story about Brás’s birth, the chapter ends: “No one expected the thunder that came to silence such beautiful lightning. And with light, the little miracle was gone” (128).

Chapter 6 Summary: “33”

The chapter begins with a trucker at a diner, watching the news on TV as they report on plane delays, telling his server he’s never gotten on a plane in his life.

The chapter then flashes back a month earlier to an airport filled with people, moving outwards towards gridlock traffic on a highway and the ambient noise of car radio. The scene cuts to Aurora giving an architectural tour of an old landmark. Her group becomes distracted, however, by the sight of smoke curling up from the distance. A plane has exploded on the tarmac at the city airport.

At the newsroom, Brás is rushed to the airport to help report on the deaths, and he stands in fear and awe of the plane on fire. A photojournalist asks him where Jorge is, since he never returned from his trip to Rio de Janeiro. He tries to call Jorge repeatedly, to no avail. He grows anxious, admitting, “We all trust cell phones to ring, airplanes to fly. We don’t want to think these things can go wrong. Because once they do…we can’t think of anything else” (140).

A week passes after the explosion. Brás struggles to keep up with, and talk to, the families of the victims. He finds himself engulfed in their stories, pulled into darker and darker comic panels. Ana tries to compliment him on his work, but he tells her he feels like a fraud. He confides in her that he fears Jorge may have been on that plane. Even when Brás learns Jorge was not on the plane, he worries about his friend since he refuses to answer his calls.

Jorge finally calls Brás back after a month. He tells him he is still in Rio de Janeiro, and he was supposed to be on the next flight out that fateful day, and he couldn’t handle it. Jorge lets Brás know that he can’t go back to his normal life and that he won’t be returning home. Brás immediately begins to drive in the middle of the night, determined to find Jorge. He then dies in a car accident. His mini-obituary lauds his work on the obituaries for the airplane explosion’s victims, which could have helped him to launch his literary career.

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

The second portion of Daytripper sharpens its focus on questions surrounding father-son relationship dynamics, particularly as Brás grows up and eventually becomes a father himself. Brás loves his father but is also intimidated by his father’s success as a writer. Benedito and Brás have a mostly positive relationship, and Benedito’s wisdom is often what helps guide Brás through major life moments such as his break-up with Olinda. However, their relationship is tested, particularly when Benedito’s child out of wedlock wishes to have a relationship with Brás after their father’s death. Throughout his life, Brás questions whether or not he can ever live up to his father—as a man, as a writer, and as a father himself to his son, Miguel.

Brás puts himself under immense pressure after Benedito’s death, which is portrayed in Chapter 4 as a fatal heart attack, which he suffers when observing his father’s belongings. Both Brás and the reader learn that he had been reading his son’s book just before his death. He fears being unable to live up to the man his father was while also staying true to himself and to the life he was meant to lead. In the act of proving himself as a writer to his father, who is also an acclaimed writer, Brás has fulfilled one of his most desired lifelong dreams. He must also play the fatherly role for his own son, Miguel, just as his father passes away, leaving a fatal void in his heart. This timing indicates that this cycle of father-son dynamics will continue into another generation.

In addition, Brás finds himself facing the inevitable process of aging as well as the passing of time. Building off of Chapters 1-3, each chapter represents a moment of new understanding and awakening for Brás: Perhaps these are the moments his father talked about, ones which will have made his life worthwhile. This is most apparent in Chapter 5, when he hears his family’s stories and realizes that they too were once young. Readers can also find evidence of this in Chapter 4, as Brás tries to juggle becoming a father while losing his father simultaneously. These transitional moments might also be viewed as losses of innocence, while Chapter 6 and Brás’s refusal to give up on Jorge suggest moments in which he stepped up for the ones he loved. By making it through these difficult times, including writing the obituaries for the plane explosion victims, Brás loses and gains parts of himself all at once.

Moon and Bá continue to play with color, but they begin to draw special attention to ideas of light and dark both in the text and in the visual drawings. This can be seen when Brás finds himself entrenched in writing obituaries for the victims of the plane explosion, as well as when his kite gets caught in the telephone wires. Brás’s mood, or perhaps his memory, of those times grows lighter and dimmer. This is partially explained by his mother, Aurora (her name is also the name of a form of light), and her nickname for Brás: Little Miracle. The reader learns the story of Brás’s birth during a blackout, and how his cries “brought back” the light again. Lightness and darkness become cues for visual foreshadowing and the difficulty of certain memories for Brás.