The graphic novel Road to Perdition written by Max Allan Collins and illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner and the memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by the quadriplegic Jean-Dominique Bauby may at first seem to exist in utterly disparate worlds by nature of their content and media, and to a certain extent this is true. But both stories draw heavily on accounts of the past—or rather, more precisely, on their narrator’s memories of the past. While the histories given in neither book appear to be suspect, they are both manipulated subtly by the biases and inclinations of the narrator as he exists in the present. Both The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Road to Perdition are in large part ruminations on the past, and although the form and content of the two are different, the selection and presentation of memory in each is largely informed by the present situation of the narrator.	
In Road to Perdition, young Michael O’Sullivan tells the story from a distance of years of his and his father’s travels after the murder of his mother and brother; at the time of the telling, Michael is fully-grown and working as a priest, though he is twelve at the time of most of the action of the graphic novel. The bulk of the story is told in flashback, summoned by the adult Michael’s recording of the events, and (aside from interstitial panels of Michael’s disembodied hand scrawling on a page) does not deviate from the main until the very last page of the graphic novel. Unlike those of Bauby in his vignettes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the flashbacks in Road to Perdition are really one extended flashback, a single bloody, inexorable narrative written without Bauby’s luxury to excise large chapters when convenient. However, while the content Michael draws from is essentially fixed by the fact that his intention is to recount a story and not write a memoir, subtle biases can be perceived in Michael’s selection of which moments to record or at least emphasize. Michael’s preoccupation with religion, as suggested by his choice of profession, appears to influence him to focus more on the religious angles of his father’s saga than he may have otherwise done, and to accentuate overtones of sins and atonement as they figure so heavily in Catholicism.
As such, Michael is following the footsteps made by his father when Michael, Sr. begged to be taken not to a hospital but to a church: to choose an attempt at absolution over a normal life or, in the father’s case, any life at all. 
 Michael may have focused on this detail of his father’s story because now Michael, as a priest, is in a position to provide this unburdening service to others—to offer to others the possibility of forgiveness upon which his father relied, and in even heightened form, as Michael would not, after his experiences as a child, be shaken by even the grisliest confession. While Michael’s entrance into the priesthood may initially seem to represent a rejection of his father and his father’s way of life, it is actually a loving act intended to honor his father. Michael’s religiosity is a tribute to his father, and all of his memories of the time they spent on the run together are informed by it, whether subconsciously or by choice.
