Jackson, Bradley
May 12, 2015
Shaw, C.
CWL 213
Blurred Lines In reading Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel, it becomes clear that Moore poses to the reader, questions of morality - of right and wrong, good and evil. Through the characters, he shows that, sometimes, the delineation between the two is a sharp line, whereas sometimes it's a blur, and often times like pornography; you just know when you see it. But to Moore, these questions are vital ones because they tether the characters to each other, to humanity. Not everyone feels this way. Not every character sees the sharp line, only the blur. In the case of Ozymandias, the superhero persona of Adrian Veidt, his actions teeter on the scale of morality, performing morally reprehensible acts, claiming they are justified and serve the greater good of the world. Through Moore, and Ozymandias, a question is posed: Can evil deeds, performed with good intentions, be considered morally right? An interesting excerpt from Watchmen is a scene in chapter 12, on page 27, where Adrian, here in his Ozymandias costume, questions his actions, having just engineered an alien attack on New York, killing millions of people, yet stopping the impending nuclear war that threatened the world. “I did the right thing, didn’t I?” he asks Doctor Manhattan, a being who, by this point in the novel, has lost interest in the affairs on humans, so much as to leave “this galaxy for on less complicated” (27). This scene is disturbing, in that Veidt attempts to measure the morality of his actions against those of a being who is, in essence, beyond our human concepts, and has no opinions of morality, stating that he understands why Veidt did what he did, “without condoning or condemning” (27) his actions. ‘It all worked out in the end,” (27) Adrian goes on to say, trying to justify to Doctor Manhattan and himself that he was justified in his actions, to which Manhattan cryptically responds “nothing ends, Adrian,” (27), implying that humanity was doomed regardless, before leaving Veidt to himself and his own conscience. Further complicating the morality of his actions is the idea that Adrian feels relieved in believing he’s saved the world, while simultaneously feeling remorse over having killed millions of innocent people. Rationalizing to Doctor Manhattan, he claims that, while he knows people may believe him to be rash, he’s made himself “feel every death” (27), feeling the pain and guilt over the murder of millions. He then goes on to say that he’s “struggled across the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity” (27), feeling justified that he’s done the right thing for the human race, but still trying to come to terms with the weight of a million souls bearing down on him. Bouncing his thoughts off Doctor Manhattan, a being above the concepts of morality and humanity, though, leaves Veidt questioning whether his actions were truly for the best for humanity, or if he had just killed millions of people for nothing, as implied by the final panel of page 27, which features a solitary Veidt, who appears to be deep in thought. Other portions of the novel also concern the complex nature of morality, and the question of whether or not evil, morally unjust deeds can be justified by good, just intentions, as evidenced by the excerpts from the comic book within the graphic novel, “Tales of the Black Freighter”. In chapter 5, through pages 8 to 21, the protagonist, known only as “The Sea Captain”, builds a raft to escape his fate, shipwrecked on an island, by binding together the dead bodies of his former shipmates, and makes his way to warn home, “borne on the naked backs of murdered men” (9). Travelling home, he notes that his raft “grew increasingly grotesque, reflecting his own gradual transformation” (21), as his humanity faded away much like the corpses on which he floated, as he fed upon the wild animals that came to feed on him, becoming more animal than man. On pages 3 through 26 of chapter 8, a drifting “Sea Captain” imagines his home “overrun by tattooed fiends” (3), the same ghastly crew that killed his crew members, and then, when faced with the horrors he imagined, he “chose madness” (3), turning him into a “spectre of revenge” (26), the last shred of his humanity gone. Through pages 12 and 13 of chapter 10, the now crazed “Sea Captain” murders two civilians, assumed to be collaborating with the pirates aboard the Black Freighter, his “purpose almost forgotten in the giddy whirl of murder itself” (13). Finally, in chapter 11, from pages 6 to 13, the “Sea Captain” came upon his hometown, and killed another man in the darkness, only to find “no pirates came, but something worse” (6), realizing that he was not killing the pirates, as he had believed, but rather his kin, and found the Black Freighter to “be waiting, not hovering to strike”, as the “unspeakable truth loomed unavoidably” before him, as he “swam towards the anchored freighter” (13), giving himself unto the murderous pirate ship. The arc of the “Sea Captain”, as shown through the excerpts of “Tales of the Black Freighter”, parallels the complex nature of morality that is shown through Veidt’s scene in page 27 of chapter 12. Adrian feels as though he’s “struggled across the backs of murdered innocents” (Chapter 12, 27) in an effort to save humanity, much like the “Sea Captain” who makes his way home “borne on the naked backs of murdered men” ( Chapter 5, 9), in an effort to save his hometown from destruction. However, in the end, both Adrian and the “Sea Captain” struggle with the fact that they’ve become what they’d feared, as Veidt made himself “feel every death” (Chapter 12, 27), and the “Sea Captain” found that “no pirates came, but something worse” (Chapter 11, 6), and that he, himself was the danger to his hometown. In the end, Adrian mentions dreaming “about swimming towards a hideous…” (Chapter 12, 27), before cutting himself off, directly relating his problem to the “Sea Captain” as he “swam towards the anchored freighter” (Chapter 11, 13). In conclusion, a main, overarching theme of the question of morality is presented to the readers, exemplified by the characters. Morality, to some like Rorschach, is black-and-white. To others, like Ozymandias, it is more complex. Adrian believes his actions, while terribly costly in terms of human life, were justified, in that it prevented (or merely delayed) the impending destruction of humanity. However, he tries to convince himself, despite his guilt and the suffering he has put himself through, that he was morally justified, even going so far as to compare his scale of morality to a being who has transcended the concept. Veidt, and his parallel in the “Sea Captain” from the “Tales of the Black Freighter”, serve to personify the complex nature of morality to the reader, believing they’re saving humanity by evil deeds.