50 pages • 1 hour read
Alan Moore, Illustr. Dave GibbonsWatchmen
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | YA | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Judge of All the Earth”
A newsvendor comments on heightening tensions with the Soviet Union, while a boy reads a comic called “Tales of the Black Freighter” (see “Symbols and Motifs” in this guide for a detailed overview of this recurring story-within-the-story). Without his mask and holding a sign proclaiming, “The End is Nigh” (79), Rorschach asks for a newspaper and tells the newsvendor that the world will end today, but he still asks the vendor to keep his newspaper for tomorrow.
At Dr. Manhattan’s lab, Manhattan and Laurie are having sex until she realizes that he has multiplied himself to be with her and prepare for an upcoming news interview. While Laurie seeks comfort with Dan, complaining about “the way he looks at things, like he can’t remember what they are and doesn’t particularly care” (85), Manhattan’s ex-girlfriend Janey Slater announces to the media that she has cancer and believes that her time with Dr. Manhattan exposed her to radiation. Dan and Laurie decide to walk from the apartment to the studio where Dr. Manhattan is beginning his interview, and along the way, muggers accost them. As reporters ask questions, first about tensions with the Soviet Union and then about the alarming number of Dr. Manhattan’s associates who have contracted cancer, Laurie and Dan confront and beat up the muggers, getting a thrill from the chance to relive their past exploits. Once Manhattan learns that Janey has cancer, he becomes distraught and tries to end the interview, but he becomes so agitated that he accidentally teleports everyone else in the room.
Dr. Manhattan’s interview receives widespread public attention, and he returns to his lab to find it newly designated as a quarantine area. He immediately transports himself to a remote building in Arizona, where he finds a picture of himself (before he was transformed into Dr. Manhattan) and Janey in their youth. He then transports himself to Mars. Laurie then comes back to the lab to find agents combing it for signs of carcinogens and government officials furious at Manhattan’s disappearance, blaming Laurie for placing him under emotional stress. Manhattan’s leaving further convinces Rorschach that there is a conspiracy to get them all. With Manhattan gone, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, leaving President Nixon (who leveraged victory in Vietnam to abolish term limits) and his advisors planning for a potential nuclear war. As Manhattan sits alone on the red planet, Nixon says that “humanity is in the hands of a higher authority than mine. Let’s just hope he’s on our side” (104).
Another set of chapters from Under the Hood follows, discussing life for the Minutemen after the group disbanded in 1949. With little media attention after their publicist married Sally, they fell into obscurity except when they were subpoenaed by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for suspected leftist tendencies. Hooded Justice refused to testify and disappeared—later speculation held Hooded Justice to be Rolf Müller, an East German weightlifter. Hollis also regrets the lack of interesting villains in the 1950s, with their typical crimes being both more ordinary and more depressing than those featured in the standard comic. The emerging counterculture also undermined confidence in costumed heroes, but the real setback was the emergence of Dr. Manhattan in 1960, with a real superhero making the non-powered feel like “We’ve been replaced” (107). Hollis met Manhattan at a charity event in June 1960, and the then-46-year-old Hollis decided then to end his career as a costumed hero and take up his father’s career as a mechanic. Later on, Hollis came to believe that his crimefighting career had had a positive impact when a young man asked to take up the mantle of Nite Owl and Laurie Juspeczyk planned to follow in her mother’s footsteps. He concludes that “the super-hero has become a part of American life. It’s here to stay. For better, or for worse” (108).
Chapter 4 Summary: “Watchmaker”
On Mars, Dr. Manhattan watches the picture of himself and Janey fall to the ground and then imagines moments from his life in rapid succession. In 1945, he is Jon Osterman, a young man learning his father’s trade in watchmaking, until his father learns of the atomic bomb and demands that his son go into atomic physics. He earns his PhD from Princeton in 1958 and begins working at a particle testing facility in Arizona. At a bar near the facility, he meets Janey Slater, and they become a couple. Janey’s watch breaks, and Jon promises to fix it, but leaves it at his lab accidentally. When he goes to retrieve it, he is shut inside the test chamber moments before it is scheduled to run a program. Janey flees in horror, and soon Jon disintegrates. Only a few months later, he reappears and puts his body back together, finally taking form as a blue, bald man. He tries to rekindle his romance with Janey, but his powers frighten her. As the government prepares to introduce him, he rejects a costume in favor of the symbol for a hydrogen atom etched on his forehead. In March 1960, a news anchor declares, “the superman exists, and he’s American” (123). He joins the new team of costumed avengers, easily snuffing out Moloch’s criminal organization. Janey is upset that Manhattan did not stop the Kennedy assassination, and he explains, “I can’t prevent the future. To me, it’s already happening” (126), an explanation that only frustrates her more. At Captain Metropolis’s meeting to form the Crimebusters, Manhattan takes a shining to Laurie Juspeczyk, and Janey leaves him.
In 1971, President Nixon asks Manhattan to fight in Vietnam, where he meets The Comedian and quickly sees how well Eddie Blake fits an environment of cruelty and horror. Within two months, the United States wins a crushing victory, and he then meets Adrian, who quit costumed adventuring, revealed his own identity, and became a business tycoon with a fortress in Antarctica. In 1977, protestors gather around the White House demanding a ban on costumed heroes, and Dr. Manhattan makes them all disappear. Still, the Keene Act passes, leaving only Manhattan and The Comedian (along with Rorschach, who refuses to comply with the law). Manhattan cycles quickly through the images of his life, feeling as though he is experiencing them all at once. From the Martian sand, he constructs a gigantic crystalline ship that looks like the inner workings of a clock.
The closing passage is from an essay called “Dr. Manhattan: Super-Powers and the Superpowers.” The author comments on how scientific progress often has ironic results, escalating the risks of war and exacerbating social inequalities. Dr. Manhattan’s power to shape matter itself according to his will should “have finally guaranteed lasting peace on earth” (141). Yet the author fears that Manhattan is “not a man to end wars,” but rather a “man to end worlds” (141). According to the author, Manhattan could theoretically give the US a qualitative edge in a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union, but Russia is a notoriously proud country, willing to fight to the bitter end as it did against Hitler, and Russia would resent the idea that Manhattan renders the nation in a permanently inferior position. In spite of Dr. Manhattan, both sides have vastly increased their nuclear stockpiles, so they must believe that war is still possible. While he hasn’t secured world peace, his power has shaped every aspect of modern life, as he has synthesized the technology that makes possible “electric cars and travel in leisure and comfort in clean, economical airships” (142). For better or for worse, “we are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan” (142).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In this pair of chapters focusing on Dr. Manhattan, his character is more fully fleshed out as a remote, almost godlike figure who never took to his role as America’s ultimate Cold War weapon very comfortably. Banishing himself to Mars after rumors surface of his closest associates (and enemies) developing cancer, he shifts his focus to the innermost workings of the universe and will henceforth take a minimal role in the affairs of humankind. Still, as the news anchor famously declares, “the superman exists, and he’s American” (123). Dr. Manhattan retains a part of the man he once was, and his extraordinary powers only serve to make him more archetypical of The American Psyche. A British man and self-described anarchist, Alan Moore has long been a critic of both American politics (especially its foreign policy) and a popular culture that reinforces the same underlying assumptions. In a 2009 interview, he declared, “America has a fondness for the unfair fight” and that “there’s a squeamishness that’s behind the American superhero myth” (Flood, Allison. “No More Heroes for Watchmen’s Alan Moore.” The Guardian, July 13, 2010). Accordingly, Dr. Manhattan only engages in combat with utterly hapless opponents, from petty criminals to Vietnamese soldiers fleeing in terror as he vaporizes them. Having emerged from World War II as an unquestioned global superpower, the United States had extraordinary power to shape the world in its image, and yet, in the eyes of many critics, its material capabilities considerably outpaced its real knowledge of the world. In The Irony of American History (1951), Reinhold Niebuhr warned that the United States could not exercise its self-appointed global role and maintain the illusions of its more insular past, and clinging to both would instead lead it to “escape from responsibilities which involve unavoidable guilt” (42). When Manhattan is not in a position of complete superiority and moral clarity (at least in the eyes of his government), then he refuses to act, whether to save an innocent Vietnamese woman from Blake’s rageful violence or millions of people from a grotesque death.
As the essay by “Professor Milton Glass” mentions, Manhattan has done nothing to reduce the risk of nuclear war, because no matter how powerful he is, other countries, such as the Soviet Union, do not think the same way that Americans do. Americans have let their power fool them into thinking that “a world run by an omnipotent God-King owning allegiance to the United States seems eminently desirable” (141). Manhattan (and by extension, US power) might curb other countries’ ambitions, but it will not deprive them of their will to defend their homeland against foreigners, even those who profess the most benevolent intentions. It is therefore appropriate that Dr. Manhattan’s visions of the future extend no further than his own perceptions. He unlocks the secrets of the universe, just as America split the atom and introduced a wave of technological innovations in the wake of World War II, from plastics to commercial aviation to television. However, he knows little, and cares even less, for the plight of his fellow human beings, even those whom he has known and loved. Even when he does not use his power, it looms so large that “we are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan” (142), who is both a superman and a self-focused, diffident philanderer who kills without mercy and only raises moral qualms only after the time for action has passed.
