Watchmen Chapter Analysis

Daniel Plumhoff

Mrs. Hiller

Science Fiction I

Per

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is a prime example of a “modern classic”. The densely layered graphic novel has received worldwide acclaim and become a perennial bestseller, garnering more attention and mainstream acceptance for the comic book form than it had arguably ever enjoyed previously as a medium. Obviously, a novel of this magnitude and complexity contains many memorable and important chapters and moments and any number of arguments could be made as to which of them are the most memorable and important. Instead, this argument will question which chapter within Watchmen is the most important to the actual understanding of the novel and the complex themes and motifs it presents.

The face is of a statue in the cemetery where the Comedian is being buried, raindrops running down its face as though it is crying. This chapter focuses on the funeral of Edward Blake, known also as The Comedian. As such, this chapter centers around and is the first presentation of the theme of death, a common theme in Watchmen – both real and symbolic, or “ontological”. Ontological death is best described as “the phenomenon of ‘world collapse,’ which occurs when one experiences an incident so jarring to his/her personal reality that the thing which gives one’s fundamental life, or world, meaning – whether God or something else – no longer applies. Preconceptions are extinguished, pushing one into a ‘new world’ where a revised reality must established.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2007. The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying,

For example, throughout the flashback scenes. In the first flashback, Edward Blake’s attempted rape of Sally Jupiter can be seen as the “death” of the innocence of superheroes, in both the novel’s world and the real world. By showing one superhero sexually assaulting another, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons effectively shattered all positive preconceived notions of the superhero and used this shocking depiction to let the reader know that Watchmen would be completely different than any other graphic novel before it, and with this scene began to force the reader to ask the question of what a “hero” really is, or if anyone can ever really be a “hero”, which is one of the most important and most recurring questions that Watchmen presents to its