Stitches: A Memoir - Analytical Response Blog

David Small’s life is extremely chaotic and in his book, Stitches: A Memoir, there are many, many topics one can cover… from his relationship with his mother, father, etc to how he interprets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into his life and even the languages that all the family members use to communicate.

For my analytical response, I’ve decided to analyze how David relates to Jesus Christ in this book. I want to write about how David was almost sacrificed through science just as Jesus was sacrificed for our sins. I picked this topic because Jesus means a lot to me and I feel like I could easily analyze how Him and David have something in common.

In the beginning of the book when David was little and he stayed the night at his grandma’s house, we see that he had no idea who Jesus was when he saw Him hanging on the cross in his grandma’s room. We don’t quite know if David ever became religious or not because his mother didn’t seem to raise him in a home with crosses hanging around (his grandmother was surprised to see that he didn’t know who Jesus was), but later on in the book, we notice that David is, in fact, similar to Jesus when it comes to him being sacrificed for science purposes as a child.

I wrote down that David was a “martyr” in my notes, but now that I think about it, I don’t think I’d use that word since David was not killed for his beliefs, but instead, his dad almost killed him by giving him too many "rads" or radiation with all the X-Rays. He didn't do it on purpose since it was "standard practice" at the time, but it still happened. This was a very unfortunate situation and it was beyond David’s choice, just as Jesus did not have a choice in dying on the cross because it was a part of God’s greater plan and it had to be done in order for us to form a relationship with our Creator.

We see in the book that when David’s dad tells him that he has cancer (and that HE was the one who caused him to get it), there is what seems to be a cross going across his face. That’s where I first figured out the relation to David and Jesus. It could very well be the shadow of something in the distance, but I don’t think David Small would draw that symbol without a meaning behind it. I feel like this is his way of showing us how he feels about being sacrificed for science when he was younger. There are a few more images in the book where we see Jesus on the cross and I plan to analyze those pictures as well and relate them back to David in some form or fashion, but this is all I’ve thought about for now!