Blankets

“I know your mother and she’s a good Christian lady and she would be disgusted with this. She would be disgusted with YOU.”

Craig is constantly plagued with guilt over his religious background and the way his ideas and hobbies conflict with traditional Christian teachings. Furthermore, he is bullied by his parents, babysitter, peers, and teachers. When his teacher discovers a drawing he made of his bullies eating excrement, she disciplines and embarrasses him in front of the entire class. This incident sets the precedent for many more incidents involving Craig’s religion instilling guilt within him.

“As a child, I thought that life was the most horrible world anyone could ever live in, and that there HAD to be something better.”

Craig’s childhood was mainly composed of stress, guilt, and fear over an eternity in hell. He was bullied, ostracized, and pressured into a belief system that he could not fully understand or relate with, and one which caused him more fear than joy. He was convinced, therefore, that life had to be better somewhere else. He frequently imagines running away to elsewhere, but these visions are dashed when he is confronted with the harsh reality that the outside world is probably even scarier and harder to handle than what he currently must deal with. Instead, Craig decides to escape to the dream world each night—at least when his brother Phil lets him sleep.

“When we drew together….I felt connected to Phil.”

Craig and his brother often have a hard time relating and getting along, arguing over every little thing. The two of them are very different people. However, one way in which they connect and are similar is their passion for drawing. The boys spend time drawing together, often on the same page, creating all sorts of creatures, shapes, and patterns. When Craig draws with Phil, he feels connected to him in a way that he does not under other circumstances.

“And I grew up STRIVING for that world—an ETERNAL world—that would wash away my TEMPORARY misery.”

An image of Craig falling naked through the sky is shown as he describes the appeal that the idea of heaven held for him as a child. Since he felt that the real world was a nasty and fearful place, he longed for an escape. The idea of going to a paradisical world free of stress, evil, and suffering sounded wonderful to Craig. His child mind soaked up the notion and he spent his youth striving for heaven and avoiding anything that was said to go against the will of God.

“I wanted to burn my memories.”

Twice in the novel, Craig uses fire as a way to extinguish his past and free himself from the pain and trauma that weighs him down. The first is when he is convinced by his pastor and his parents that drawing is a selfish pursuit and therefore a sin. He burns all of his drawings in an attempt to kill off the side of himself that is sinful and selfish. He does this again when he burns all of the gifts that Raina gave him (except the blanket).

“Something about being rejected at church camp felt so much more awful than being rejected at school.”

Craig is an outcast wherever he goes: home, school, church, and church camp. He sees the rejection from his peers in different lights depending on context. At regular school, his peers are rejecting him due to persecution. He feels much like a victim. At church camp, however, the kids are believers, involved with God, and seem to be rewarded for their faith—they are popular and good-looking. Craig thus sees his rejection at church camp as a rejection by God himself.

“Church camp awakened a new skepticism in my faith.”

A distance begins to grow between Craig and his faith as he gets older and discovers more about the nature of his religion. While attending church camp, he observes the students singing praises and being taught about their position as God’s flock of sheep. He finds the idea of a hivemind off-putting and does not see it as a reflection of the bible’s teachings. To Craig, Christianity is about the individual person’s search for and relationship with God, and his religion seemed to be promoting the opposite ideal.

“She was restful and yet her eyebrows were knit in a worried manner, forming a permanent furrow upon her brow. What was she worried about?”

The people in the novel are often characterized by the way they are drawn and the visual observations that Craig makes about them. In his first intimate moment with Raina at church camp, the two sneak under a skeeball machine to have some privacy. All Raina wants to do is sleep, and she lies on Craig while he strokes her hair. He sees a furrow in her eyebrow and wonders what she is so stressed about; later, when he goes to visit her, he finds out that she is dealing with a divorce, caring for her disabled siblings and baby niece, and trying to complete her senior year of high school. Raina is taking on a great deal.

“Raina was the first to write after church camp and her letters renewed my faith in the notion of making marks on paper.”

Much of the inner growth that Craig experiences during the winter is due to his relationship with Raina and the ways that she inspires and forces him to change. Craig had previously given up drawing in the name of his faith, but when Raina writes to him after camp, his creativity is lit up once more, and he is deeply motivated to start drawing again. He writes to her and sends her drawings and the two begin developing an emotional and romantic bond through “marks on paper.”

“The only word Raina squeezed in amidst her father’s babble was a simple exclamation: ‘snow.’”

Snow is the most commonly used motif in the novel, and it is thread throughout each event and memory that Craig writes about. As Raina’s father drives Raina and Craig back to their place for the two weeks that will change Craig’s life, Craig stares out the window watching the snow fall and the way it forms on the ground. He notices that Raina is doing the same thing and is moved by the way she seems to have the same passion for snow that he does.

“Suddenly, I realized I was sprawled out on Raina’s bed—casually—as if I owned it…and it struck me as a profound act of disrespect for such an object.”

Beds and blankets are sacred to Craig as they are the one place where he always feels safe and secure, apart from the world that hurts him. When he finds himself hanging out on Raina’s bed while she is not around, he becomes disgusted with himself and religious guilt creeps up once again. He reads a biblical passage about a woman who violated Jesus by touching his garb without his permission, and immediately jumps off the bed.

“From our gingerbread molds, we watched the shadows extend as far as they could reach, and the light fell from the sky and began slowing up through the carpet of snow.”

Craig and Raina’s love is still developing, but they are completely swept up in one another in this moment. They make snow angels together and watch the snow fall and shadows on the ground change shape. Many of the moments Craig describes are steeped in natural imagery, particularly snow. He illustrates these moments through poetic words and black and white images of snow against a black night sky.

“And then the sense of space, of depth, is Lost as the snowflakes fall into a pattern.”

Craig regularly makes comparisons between his thoughts and feelings, as well as his relationship, to the natural environment he is in. He and Raina both live in Northern states, and most of the story takes place in winter, so most of the natural imagery Craig uses involves snow. In this instance, Craig is comparing the accumulating density of snow as it falls to the ground and piles up with the way he and Raina are becoming closer and more connected to one another. The word “Lost” is capitalized to signify the intensity with which they are both completely lost in the moment and in each other.

“Thank you, God, for your perfect creation, with skin as soft and pale as moonlight, the bones beneath her skin tangling and rearranging, rising along the iliac crest, and dipping into the clavicles….and the fallen snow welcomes the falling snow with a whispered ‘HUSH.’”

Craig is falling more and more in love with Raina and admires her every move and detail of her appearance as she lays sleeping beside him. He sees within her the perfection of God. He relates the feeling he has in this moment back to his metaphor of accumulating snow being like their budding relationship. When Craig talks about Raina, it is often with a poetic and highly aesthetic tone. Four full pages of art are drawn which depict Raina sleeping, looking innocent and troubled at the same time.

“Thank you for the rhythm of her movements, curling—sprawling—Her contours lapping like waves around the blankets. She is yours. She is perfect. A temple with hair spilling over her temples…”

Craig is falling more and more in love with Raina with each passing day, and when he writes about her, it is always with grace and a poetic prose style. He finds her every move and detail beautiful, a gift from God, and draws several pages of images of Raina sleeping in different positions. He sees no flaws in her and wants nothing more than to be near her. Here, the author uses a religious pun, calling Raina a temple of worship while describing the way her hair falls across the temples on her head.

“The blankets churned and splashed—and the wind tore down our sails.”

Craig and Raina make love for the first time, and while this is always a milestone for a relationship and for an adolescent, it is even more so for Craig because he is finally relaxed and confident enough in his skin and in the eyes of God to be able to connect with Raina on that level without guilt. He feels as if he is exactly where he is supposed to be. He compares the moment to his fantasies with his brother as a child, pretending their bed was a ship in a storm. Many of Craig’s happiest moments seem to occur in a bed.

“I studied her—aware that she’d been crafted by a DIVINE ARTIST. Sacred, Perfect, and Unknowable. And with reverence, I covered her body with the quilted blanket she had made me.”

Craig is finally learning to consolidate his faith and his love for Raina, rather than having the two aspects of his life conflict with one another. He sees her as an angel, innocent and divine, and he uses the blanket that she made for him with love to express his love back to her. Events and motifs often come full circle in Craig’s story, and the blanket repeatedly serves as a vessel through which Craig and Raina connect.

“The day shone brilliantly white. Sky and earth became one, trees outstretched their naked limbs, snow drifts changed shapes—washing away to reveal tufts of briar.”

Snow guides the narrative of Craig’s life and many of his memories are surrounded by images of snow. Craig is from a town, not a large city, and is not only used to being enveloped by nature but loves it. To him, nature is beautiful and worth experiencing in all its glory. As the snow changes form and winds bring new weather, so too do Craig and Raina change.

“The final step would be the ability to study the sky in the day—to look directly into the light of the sun.”

Craig’s teacher explains a metaphor laid out by Aristotle in which prisoners are bound in a cave and made to believe that shadow puppets dancing on the walls are real. When they are confronted with the truth, they are shocked, and many go into a state of denial. If they are confronted with the sun, their mind may not be able to comprehend it at all. Eventually, though, they are able to confront and accept the truth and stare at it directly. This is the process Craig undergoes in accepting that his relationship with Raina has ended.

“It suddenly struck me as absurd that something as divine as God’s speech could be pinned down in physical (mass-produced) form.”

Craig gets older and wiser and begins finding flaws and contradictions in the teachings of the Bible. He cannot ignore what he finds, and his pastor provides no help. His faith is shaken, and everything that he has been taught and lived by his entire life thus far he now views as false. Craig still believes in God but sees perversion and corruption in religion as a mass-produced ideology.

“In LUKE, the gospel that paid particular attention to women and children, a beautiful ‘OR’ presented itself….the kingdom of God is within/among you.”

When Craig goes home to visit for his brother’s wedding, he finds his old bible in the box he stashed in the cubby hole along with the blanket from Raina. He begins casually reading passages, explaining that he has a newfound love for passages that are translated from Hebrew or Greek and thus present multiple veins of interpretation. He finds joy in the idea that there is no one direct path to God, and that proof of this is in the bible’s own words.

“I could see Raina making the quilt—selecting the fabrics and cutting squares from a large swatch of cloth. And read in sequence, like a comic strip, they told a story.”

The quilt that Raina sews for Craig when he comes to visit is a recurring symbol throughout the novel that represents the story he and Raina wove together. Their bond, although temporary, was multi-patterned, closely knit, and it kept their hearts and bodies warm through a dark cold winter. Much like the images in the novel, the squares on the quilt were drawn with a particular style that tells its own story. Craig breaks the fourth wall here, making the reader conscious of the book’s style by recognizing the same style in the quilt.

“We use…the seasons as increments of measurement.”

The winter and the snow that accompanies it are a central motif in the novel and in Craig’s life. Everything he does, and everywhere he goes, he is surrounded by a snowy winter. It is during this winter that almost everything in his life changes: He experiences his first love, his first independence away from home, and his first step away from religion. When he looks back later as he writes and illustrates the novel, he realizes that his life seems to have taken place in a series of increments measured by the seasons.