Ghost World: Argumentative Comparison

Pictured on the back cover of the comic book “Ghost World,” by Daniel Clowes, are the two main characters of the book in full color. This strikingly significant image, surely shrugged off by most Clowes’ readers, represents worlds of diversity within the frames of the book. Sporting pink spandex pants underneath her goldfinch yellow skirt and a blue t-shirt to match perfectly, Enid seems to live her life outside the bubble. She’s a very dynamic girl, especially interested in her surroundings and people around her. On the other hand, Becky is dressed like a “typical” girl, with a long black skirt and a white blouse, thus representing her conforming presence in the world. Becky is much more passive than Enid, going with the flow of things just living life. The contrasting personalities of Enid and Becky come ironically, being best friends. However, it brings out their defining qualities in the comic book while quietly calling attention to the values of life, what is real and what is not.

The title page on the second page of the book can be analyzed to show how Enid lives a different life than those on the “inside.” The illustration is colored in a light hue of blue, somewhat casting a bleak and lifeless feeling. The picture shows Enid walking down the street with her hands in her pockets, back turned. Nighttime falls as the luminous moon watches down on Ghost World at dusk, casting Enid’s shadow down on the sidewalk behind her. To her right is a house with window and the phrase Ghost World scrawled on the side of building. Everything in the scene is shaded and colored in a robin’s egg blue, contributing more to the dusk light feeling and the dreary tone. In the frame of the picture, Enid is walking out of the page to the left, facing away from the reader. To her right is the building with the window. Inside, the television is on with someone watching, but only the person’s hand holding a drink is visible. After reading the book, you can infer that this scene represents the two “worlds” in the comic book: the inside world and the outside world. Enid is outside the window looking and walking away from it, instead of walking towards and looking in. She does things differently from others, including her best friend, Becky. Enid is one to wear goofy outfits, weird looking masks, and dye her hair extreme colors. Her world is her own and to her it is real.

On the other hand, in the first few opening frames, an obvious difference in attitude between Becky and Enid enlightens itself in their conversation. While Becky watches a corny stand-up comedian on T.V., Enid reads a magazine that she utterly despises for the “trendy, stuck up prep school bitch” audience that it caters to. It bothers her so much because it’s Becky’s magazine, and it seems Enid is almost insulted that she bought it. Indirectly, Becky buying a magazine of the sort shows her place in the world that Becky, herself, lives in. The real world, the world which subscribes to trendy magazines and corny comedians and the like. The world which Becky accepts and Enid rejects.

A major difference between Becky and Enid is that Becky accepts what life is offering her and what she is becoming, whereas Enid remains defiant. In the scene on page 15, a young slender man asks about the price of an item that he’s interested in buying from Enid’s yard sale. Enid, sitting at a desk in her front yard, reneges on the sale of “Goofie Gus,” a small plush toy she must have endeared when she was a kid. Near the middle end of the book, Enid obsesses over finding a record of a song from her childhood with the phrase “a smile and a ribbon in her hair” as the only line she can remember. She’s pretty intent on the record, going to record stores asking about it, stopping by her friend Josh’s house to see if he knew anything about it. When she finally found it lying on her bed, she threw herself on the box of records in tears. She sobbed for hours and hours, listening to the notes resonate in the room and disappear into emptiness. Tears streamed down from her eyes, the salty drops meandering slowly down the contours of her face. It’s plain for anyone to see: she was lost. Where was she going? What was she going to do? She was to take a college entrance exam and be sent off on an ambiguous adventure into yet another world, the last thing she wants. In the later frames of the book, when she explains to Becky that she had failed the exam and isn’t going to end up in college, the feeling the scene gives the reader is that she didn’t pass on purpose, that she didn’t want to go to college and enter a “new world.” Enid doesn’t want to leave Becky, even though there’s a fork in their road together after high school. She’s running from her “destiny” in the real world, but her old life has already left her, along with Becky. Becky is set to accept a new life