Destiny

IMG_4632 (2).JPG

Cover of Destiny

chapters.jpg

The 17 chapters of Destiny

Destiny, by Otto Nückel, is described as a "novel in pictures." The book is designed in a very minimalistic way. Each page features only a single image, done in black and white and in the style of a medieval woodcut. This presentation invites the reader to focus on each image as its own complete scene in the novel, as opposed to modern graphic novels, where the action continues from panel to panel to create a continuous story. Destiny plays with readers' expectations of the tropes of literature; each scene is familiar, and gives the impression of any number of similar scenes in other literry works. In this way, the novel calls attention to the way people read and what they expect to find. If one can get a very complete sense of a story just by looking at some images that invoke scenes from literature, then perhaps some writing is not much more than a repackaging of a finite number of tropes into new orders, or with new characters.

Then again, the use of pictures as opposed to words to tell a story has its own unique aspects. For one thing, it asks much more of the reader than a typical novel, since the reader has to interpret and fill in the blanks between scenes. In fact, the style of the woodcuts helps give the novel an overall air of mystery; people are drawn as sillhouettes mostly, and attention is rarely given to their faces. This sense of mystery leaves the reader feeling like their reading of the novel is only a guess at one possible progression of the story. All of the details have to be totally invented. This is an interesting challenge to traditional novels, where the author gives you all of the details.

To further the novel's vagueness, the only text in the novel is the chapter titles, which are usually no more than one or two words. These titles provide just enough of an organizational framework to make the images into a story, but each title is very vague in and of itself. They are usually only one or two words and are either broad terms like "Love" or "Vengence," or give a general idea of something but hold back on details, like "The Sin" or "The Hunchback." The reader has to work with the title and images to figure out exactly what these mysterious things are and how they fit into the story.

Overall, it's impressive how reading over the years has trained us as a culture to be able to interpret stories just from vague mysterious scenes and sparse titles, and it's also very impressive how the author uses this training to tell his story in a very unique style. Below are some examples of images from Destiny.

Destiny