In the Eye of the Blind: A Biofictional Account of Nathan Leopold in <em>The Hunting Accident</em> (2017)

This article examines how graphic biographical fiction dramatizes historical personalities as characters, whose life story is framed as a narrative with moral closure. I suggest that this mechanism is at work in the graphic novel The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry by David L. Carlson and Landis Blair (2017). Often referred to as ‘unbelievable true story,’ this work tests the boundaries of verisimilitude while proving to be highly referential. The Hunting Accident incorporates multiple textual and paratextual levels that bear the traits of biographical fiction, the autobiographical novel, and graphic adaptation. Here, fictional and real stories mirror each other, constituting an underlying narrative structure, which each character is bound to follow: the perennial tale of ‘crime and poetry’. The central figure is Matthew Rizzo, a blind writer, who lost his vision in an armed robbery and was taught Braille by Nathan Leopold, a notorious murderer, with whom Rizzo shared a prison cell. The graphic novel reflects on the conflicted public image of Leopold, the stigma of a criminal, and the ethics of repentance, by establishing a narrative duality, where referential and fictional discourses mirror each other in a parable, metaphor, and ontological metalepsis, as the characters make sense of their experiences through stories.