resides in Dr. Davidson’s telling David that his mother doesn’t love him just a
few minutes into their first appointment. Indeed, by the usual rules of prob-
ability, such a pronouncement would mark Dr. Davidson as an incompetent
psychiatrist, and, thus, would signal that the appointment itself, which has
been arranged by David’s mother, is another sign of her deficient parenting. To
put this point another way, it is impossible for Dr. Davidson to have acted this
way during this first appointment with David and to be the excellent therapist
that Small represents him to be.
I have taught Stitches multiple times, including to a group of two dozen
medical students, and only a few readers have wondered about Dr. Davidson’s
competence in making his pronouncement so soon after meeting David. Fur-
thermore, no one has commented on the scene as either an impossibility or an
implausibility until I raised the issue. I do not think that my students are inat-
tentive readers. Instead, I submit that they are properly registering the scene
as plausible, and that this plausibility arises from a crossover effect in the nar-
rative progression: readerly dynamics—rhetorical readers’ unfolding responses
to the progression—cross over into textual dynamics and lend a logic to the
events that is more powerful than the logic of external probability. Because Dr.
Davidson’s pronouncement is not impossible in the way that Achilles’ pursuit
of Hector or the stenographer’s becoming pregnant by her employer is, I do
not want to call the scene a probable impossibility. Instead it is a probable
implausibility, that is, an unlikely event according to the logic of character and
action that becomes all but inevitable in the unfolding progression. Small’s
reliance on the crossover is all the more remarkable because the scene is also
the turning point in his memoir. Let us look more closely.
The textual dynamics of Small’s memoir immediately establish the global
instability as his difficult relationship to his parents, especially his mother.
He titles the first chapter “I Was Six,” and he skillfully uses his black-and-
white drawings to depict his isolation in his unhappy family. His first self-
representation depicts his six-year-old self alone with his drawing materials,
working (in a bit of foreshadowing) on a picture of a rabbit. The retrospective
verbal narration begins to identify some of the specific unhappiness of this
unhappy family. “Mama had her little cough” (15) are the first words of the
narration, and Small continues by reporting the other wordless communica-
tions in his family: his mother’s slamming of cupboards, his father’s hitting
a punching bag, his brother’s banging on his drums, and his own frequent
illnesses. The global instability gets complicated with just about every panel,
and Small depicts his mother as especially cold and angry. As if that’s not bad
enough, young David’s interest in Alice in Wonderland, which he exhibits by
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