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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Smiley Face
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains depictions of graphic violence, violence against animals, suicide, alcohol addiction, and attempted rape. The source text also contains outdated, racist, and misogynistic language, which is reproduced in this guide only through quotations.
The Comedian (Eddie Blake) for years wore a small button with the image of the smiley face, and when he was murdered, it was found next to his body with a single streak of blood (an image that often graces the cover of the book). Dan Dreiberg drops it on top of Blake’s casket at the funeral. The smiley face is most immediately an indicator of Blake’s worldview. As Rorschach summarizes it, everyone must eventually come to grips with the cruelty and apparent meaninglessness of existence. Most costumed adventurers respond with “some animal urge to fight and struggle” in a futile attempt to make the world a better place (68). By contrast, Rorschach says, “Blake understood. Treated it like a joke […] he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it” (69). The 20th century is defined as the insistence that the world is in fact improving, while its ostensible improvements only multiply the means of visiting misery upon other human beings. Blake wore his button in Vietnam, where American forces were supposedly building a democracy, putting a “happy face” on a program of mass murder and destruction. The button symbolizes The Absurdity of Costumed Crimefighting: that people would put on silly costumes, give themselves even sillier names, and think that they can tackle complex social problems. Blake chose to embody this absurdity its most exaggerated and ruthless form, and it is telling that in doing so, he made himself extremely useful to the United States government.
Watches and Watching
The word “watch” carries two parallel meanings throughout the comic. The beginning of each chapter features a clock ticking toward midnight, with more and more blood dripping down with each chapter. This refers to Adrian Veidt’s looming attack, which will take place just before midnight, as well as the Doomsday Clock that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have maintained since 1947 to gauge the threat of nuclear war. Although the characters don’t realize it, they can no more stop Adrian’s plot than stop time itself, and nothing they do has the slightest impact on the ultimate course of events. The 12 chapters are clearly meant to represent the hours of the clock, especially by taking the form of Roman numerals. At the same time, Dr. Manhattan (himself the son of a watchmaker) is able to perceive time in a non-linear fashion, experiencing countless events simultaneously and seeing how they fit together. The narrative itself operates in a similar way, bouncing between various perspectives and time periods until they finally cohere into a single narrative.
“Watching” also figures prominently, with the protestors’ graffiti asking “who watches the watchmen” (60)—in other words, who monitors those charged with monitoring society at large? Just as Dr. Manhattan can see his own life all at once, Adrian is consistently watching an entire bank of television screens, shaping all of their disparate messages into investments and marketing strategies for both his business and his ultimate plan. The phrase “watchmen” does not appear in the text except for that graffiti and the final epitaph from the Roman poet Juvenal, strongly implying that superheroes are an unaccountable authority bound to abuse their superior powers.
“Tales of the Black Freighter”
Beginning in Chapter 3 and reappearing periodically until Chapter 11, the story is intermixed with a comic called “Tales of the Black Freighter” that a young man is reading at a local newsstand. Briefly summarized, a sailor is marooned by a pirate ship, and as he fears for the safety of his family, he undergoes a desperate attempt to return home, but in doing so, experiences a break with reality. He undertakes an increasingly grotesque series of measures to speed home, from stuffing the corpses of his fellow sailors below his raft for flotation, to turning the body of an innocent woman into a pretend companion. Having convinced himself that the pirates have already triumphed and anyone awake must be among them, he storms into his own house and kills his own wife before realizing the magnitude of his folly. As his children shriek, he wades into the ocean and finds the Black Freighter, taking part among the ranks of the cursed souls on board.
The precise meaning of the comic to the overall story is widely disputed, but its escalating sense of dread runs parallel to the growing threat of nuclear war, reaching its climax right before Adrian Veidt unleashes his psychic shockwave on New York City. It mirrors the sense of powerlessness faced by the heroes, who grow more desperate as they realize how little effect they will have on the ultimate outcome. The writer of the comic, Max Shea, is himself an unwitting partner in Veidt’s scheme and one of its earliest victims.
