In the 2000s, North America saw many adults from fundamentalist backgrounds share their experiences. Young people from evangelical families began telling their stories through memoirs, blogs, and graphic novels. These accounts often described childhoods marked by both love and strict discipline, where obedience to God was seen as love. Over time, many realized that tenderness and harm were closely linked. These stories showed how love could be both powerful and controlling, often given with many conditions.
Craig Thompson’s Blankets fits into this cultural moment, showing how people try to relearn what care means when old moral beliefs begin to fall apart.
At its core, Blankets is about personal and ethical growth. Craig’s journey is slow, painful, and full of lessons about how to treat others. The graphic memoir follows his path from childhood to adulthood, using the style of a bildungsroman to show how identity is shaped by facing hard truths. The central conflict revolves around Craig’s struggle to reconcile his rigid religious upbringing with his emerging understanding of care, empathy, and ethical independence. This tension between his inherited beliefs and personal growth guides the reader through a compelling exploration of moral responsibility and relational maturity.
The memoir shows maturity as a practical approach to personal responsibility, not just an abstract goal. Drawing on ideas from feminist philosophers, it suggests that growing up is less about becoming independent and more about noticing when care is present or missing in ourselves and others.
In this context, care can be understood as the practice of empathy and responsiveness, a central theme in feminist ethics. It emphasizes the mutual dependence of people and the importance of tending to relationships. This definition of care helps frame the narrative, allowing readers to understand the complexities of Craig’s journey in discovering genuine care and empathy.
Traditionally, a bildungsroman follows a young person whose ideals are tested and often broken as they learn about themselves and the world. In Blankets, this process is especially clear.
Craig was raised in an inflexible evangelical Christian family in the countryside of Wisconsin, which guarantees moral clarity and spiritual certainty, yet allows very little space for emotional ambiguity and vulnerability. Fear thrums through his childhood, constricting his capacity for self-expression. Guilt and constant self-observation shape and confine his inner world from a very young age, creating the feeling that he is perpetually watched, judged, and compared against an unachievable moral standard.
In Craig’s family, faith functions primarily as a disciplinary code rather than a source of comfort or mutual care. Obedience is rewarded, doubt is punished subtly, and expression is frequently repressed as sin or weakness. Theological correctness supersedes empathy, and moral correctness becomes the only criterion for responsiveness.
This absence of a positive model for care leaves Craig without the tools to nurture relationships or act ethically. The failure of his upbringing to offer moral guidance becomes a central issue he must confront and transform as he grows into maturity.
The bond between Craig and his younger brother Phil is the very first relational space where care is recognized, though in a fragile and imperfect manner. The two brothers, who by the end of their childhood are still not allowed to have separate beds, resort to a form of mutual dependence that is both comforting and restrictive.
In one poignant scene depicted in the memoir, the brothers lie awake in the dim light, their whispered words swirling around fears and dreams. A single image captures Phil reaching out to touch Craig’s arm, a silent gesture of reassurance underscoring their wordless bond. This visual moment encapsulates the unspoken support and connection that thread through their shared existence, highlighting how care manifests quietly yet powerfully in small acts of presence.
Their relationship is characterized by intense physical closeness, living together in the same way day in and day out, and an unspoken communication that needs no words. In regard to it, the bond has a care principle which is basic yet strong, made up of weakness and simple existence: one person takes care of another not by choice but because of the fact of how they are together, night after night.
However, the trauma has a strong impact on the relationship. The sexual abuse that the brothers go through with a babysitter gets no attention from their parents at all, even in a minimal way, let alone in a protective and caring manner. The silence is therefore very harmful. The adults’ inability to react, through listening, believing, or offering emotional support, shows an ethical absence in the middle of the family.
Blankets presents one of its most penetrating insights here: caring is not good intention or moral correctness but it is being “responsive.” With no identification, no one to acknowledge the suffering and react to it, even living becomes isolated.
Throughout the memoir, Thompson uses recurring visual motifs of open hands and blank panels to reflect this idea of responsiveness. Open hands signify the potential for connection and the readiness to offer support, while blank panels emphasize moments where communication and understanding are absent, leaving characters in isolation.
Craig’s first affiliation with people demonstrates to him not only how care can be in the simplest form but also the feeling of care being absent, and the way the absence can quietly and profoundly hurt. The visual symbolism strengthens the narrative, illustrating how responsiveness acts as a bridge between intention and action.
Craig’s childhood witnessed a considerable deficiency of support, which directly affected his later crises of faith and identity. The author of Blankets presents inner conflict as a pivotal part of the growth process than as an obstacle. The protagonist finds himself caught in a war between the devout life which was dictated to him and the existence of others whom he sees, which seems chaotic, liberated, and more truthful.
Over the course of conversations and interactions with his non-believing classmates, Craig slowly starts to doubt the need for his whole worldview. What he had previously seen as absolute and beyond doubt is gradually uncovered to be historically and socially constructed.
Such moments of doubt do not evoke relief or inquiry but panic. Craig’s interrogation leads to heavy feelings of anxiety, bad mood, and self-hate, not because doubt is evil by its nature, but because his belief system has always left him without an ethical vocabulary for uncertainty. In his world, doubting faith is a danger of losing spiritual, moral, and, thus, total existential life.
Thompson portrays such a psychological breakdown very clearly, displaying how stringent moral codes gradually break up and split under the weight of human experience. The outcome is a picture of a young person who is going through the horrible process of imagining a self that is outside the boundaries and used to shape his identity.
Craig’s crisis concerns and affects relationships at the most personal level. Ethics of care assert how ethical maturation takes place through the experience of relationships, not in solitude, and Craig’s maturity points out this very pattern. His interaction with Raina at a faith-based winter camp turns out to be the watershed in Craig’s education, not due to the fact that it gets rid of skepticism, but because it opens up for him another type of interpersonal interaction.
The relationship between them develops through the classic pattern of teenage love: it is very involving, it is full of emotions, and it looks like it is completely isolated from everything else.
For a short time, the relationship acts like a type of refuge. With Raina, Craig finds love without the ever-present criticism and affection without the burden of orthodoxy. The feeling of love is soft instead of harsh, positive instead of negative. Visually, the “honeymoon stage” is emphasized by Thompson through softer lines, larger white spaces, and slower, more lyrical rhythm. The result is a feeling of how time has become elastic, how love has momentarily blocked the harshness of reality and given Craig a chance to see love without the burden of fear.
Nonetheless, Blankets is not one to idealize love as a simple or clear-cut ethical solution. When the truth starts to infiltrate the situation again, Craig has to deal with the complex web of support that is at the center of Raina’s life. Raina’s family is structured around labor (both physical and emotional), ranging from caregiving for disabled siblings to dealing with the long-term effects of divorce and burnout. In such a situation, care is exhausting, cyclical, and frequently unrecognized.
By her presence alone, Raina turns out to be an embodiment of the care ethic. She is patient, attentive, and available, which are the traits that sharply contrast with Craig’s upbringing, which was marked by rigidity. The watching of Raina caring for others compels Craig to acknowledge the real nature of work relationships. Gradually, he starts perceiving care as endurance, sacrifice, and even the readiness to be with when love is challenging or exhausting.
To the extent that it goes, the insight is a factor in the romance. The issue of Craig’s wish for total union with Raina, such as his wish to drop out of school, to cut himself off from the outside world, and to live in the warmth of the relationship, points out the boundaries of his growth. He longs for a retreat. Blankets puts forth the idea which although love is a strong force, it still cannot be the sole reason for living when such love is isolated and cut off from taking care of others.
The bildungsroman has to include the narrative of disillusionment, and it is, in the case of Craig, treated very subtly but harshly. He learns how care is a context-dependent thing that dictates its extent.
The breakup of a love relationship is very painful, at the same time, very instructive. It gives him the insight into how the life of virtue is full of compromises, about one is to be attentive to the needs of others, but in a way, it does not relieve their burdens, and finally, one should regard the impermanence of things as a part of real love.
Art, in the end, is the medium through which Craig learns to receive and hold such lessons. In the entire story, drawing is simultaneously a mode of expressing and a method of surviving. When religion cannot give Craig an emotional language and when the divine cannot explain sorrow, wish, or perplexity, art takes over the role. By means of drawing, Craig is able to make public what he cannot express without risk, transforming horror, desire, and doubt into what is seen and communicated.
The strongest echo of such emphasis on material expression is the quilt Raina makes for Craig, one of the most powerful symbols in the memoir. Visibility of love is depicted through the quilt: warmth, time, labor, intimacy, and memory, all being hand-woven together. It is not a coincidence that the single, imperfect, handmade object holds greater ethical significance than all the religious symbols Craig meets in his life.
The quilt, unlike scripture or theological dogma, does not require belief or obedience. It shows care as an active practice, meaning it is created, given, and held even after the relationship has broken up.
The more Craig grows, the more parallel changes happen with respect to his faith. He does leave religion because religion could not help him. The rigidity of the evangelical community’s morals, such as its obsession with sin, purity, and having correct beliefs, starts to seem to Craig as the opposite of the compassion, attentiveness, and honesty which he has gradually come to consider important. What was once a source of certainty now appears to be limited and devoid of emotions.
Craig’s spiritual dilemma is quite similar to the dilemmas faced by the protagonists in the bildungsroman, whose paths lead them from imposed beliefs to a more ethically based and personal understanding. He is not looking for denial, but for a paradigm that can truly foster human relationships. What is contrary to dogma is not radical doubt or immorality, but a softer, more relational type of morality.
The new moral code, which is developing, is in perfect harmony with the ethics of care, which puts empathy, acknowledgment, and response at the top of the list, while the imposition of strict rules and the searching for absolute truth come in last. Craig, by not clinging to dogmatic certainty, does not get on the right moral path. On the contrary, he turns his ethical compass in the direction of care’s experiential reality.
Thompson, through pacing and structure, visually reinforces the ethical development in which the memoir’s fluctuation between childhood and youth makes the reader perceive how early experiences embed and solidify as traits, apprehensions, and eventually choices. Hardly, memory remains a storytelling technique and practically becomes a terrain, revealing how people’s ideas are created, backed up, contested, and eventually changed little by little through the passing of time.
The supposed simplicity of Thompson’s artistic style hides an unanticipated intensity; the vivid lines, unoccupied areas, and minimalistic arrangements keep the audience in, and it is invited to scrutinize and to comprehend more profoundly Craig’s psyche from his insecurities, longings, and misunderstandings.
It is how the book actually prompts a participation which is based on being more observant than being judgmental, and it does not require the reader to either pass a death sentence on Craig or plead for his forgiveness. Instead, it simply invites us to follow Craig’s growth and to see how care can either make or break a person’s existence.
Blankets does not narrate a heroic story with a transcendence or a clear-cut moral and does not present clear endings or a final ethical arrival. However, it portrays a softer story of getting familiar with the uncertainty and not making such uncertainty a reason for being unkind, neither to oneself nor to others. From such a perspective, growth does mean the acquisition of the ability to be humane in the midst of it.
The memoir is a bildungsroman that outlines the creation of a person who realizes how life is dependent on relations, delicate, and always in progress. By the time Craig reaches the peak of his career and faces his crisis, he has learned through the discussions with his brother, the confrontation with Raina, the commitment to art, and the struggle with doubts that love is not a permanent quality or an awarded moral virtue. It is a practice, imperfect, demanding, and always redefined through daily interactions with others.
In such regard, Blankets has reconceives it as an ethical awakening, transitioning to adulthood where Thompson seems to indicate, is less about becoming sure of your identity and more about being kinder in your interactions with others. However, what would it look like to practice love in a society that hardly ever shows us how? Similar to the blanket itself, it remains intertwined in our minds long after the last page.
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