The Youth on the Street Corner

Alan Moore's Watchmen is full of chaos and confusion. There are so many storylines, so many different things happening at once, that still tie in with the central plot of the book. In chapters 3, 5, 8, 10 and 11, an African-American boy is seen sitting on a street corner next to a newsstand, reading Tales of the Black Freighter, a comic book within the comic book. How the story in Freighter is told oftentimes matches with the storyline of the main novel.

Moore could've made this boy any of the different races, yet he is seen with black skin and talks with the same dialect. Such quirks as "Suit y'self, jive ass", "Hey man, I'm reading!" and "Shee-it!" are the only types of comments that come out of this boy's mouth. The author makes the point that even though he is an adolescent that reads comic books, he's still "fluent" in this type of "language". Dialogue of this nature is common in novels by white authors. Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, "...the dialogue of black characters is construed as an alien, estranging dialect made deliberately unintelligible by spellings contrived to disfamiliarize it;..". Just take a look at the way Moore spells "yourself" when the black boy is speaking. "Y'self" is not in the English dictionary. It is however, in the racist dictionary.

Despite his obviously racist accent, the comic he reads, Tales of the Black Freighter, is a strong compliment to the emotions the characters are feeling at a certain time. During talks of war with the Soviet Union, one man says, "This war's lookin' serious. Makes a guy start figuring escape routes, y'know?" The boy then reads in Black Freighter, "It was then I conceived of building a raft...". These similarities in storylines are important to the understanding of the story. Without the presence of the African-American boy, the story would not fit together as well. "...the Africanist presence informs in compelling and inescapable ways the texture of American literature," Morrison writes. This statement assesses the importance of the black character in American novels. This principle can be applied here; the African-American (whose name is unknown throughout the book), despite being a minor character, really adds to the "texture" of the chaotic, sometimes confusing, all-white novel that is Alan Moore's Watchmen.

The Internet, Criticism and Analysis: Stephen Burn's Take on the Modern Critic

Stephen Burn makes the following points in his essay:

 There have always been critics of literature, from the first book to the modern day. These critics have changed over time. Critics were once a professional, since the invention of the Internet, anyone can be a critic on websites like Amazon. While many may say this is a bad thing that no professional's opinion is accessible as quickly as the Internet is, Burn begs to differ. He claims it makes it so authors can get opinions straight from the readers themselves.  I agree with this point; authors are selling books to common readers, not professional critics, so their opinion should definitely matter to the author.

Burn's next point is simply this: critics need to stop being more critical! Modern critics need to loosen the reigns of genre, character, emotivity and realism. Contemporary novels show the ever-evolving works of fiction that include, among other things, other genres. This is a good point; as literature has changed and developed, so should the critics!

The final point Stephen Burn discusses is that critics should do more than critique a book, they should try and think about the author's intentions while he or she was writing it, and determine whether or not the author does a good job at accomplishing them.This is true; if a critic does not understand a writer's intentions, he or she cannot write a proper critique, for it may seem like a "bad" book in one view, but may be "the best book ever written" if the critic knows the goals the author is trying to accomplish.

These are different, yet true, opinions of what modern critics should be, and what they should critique.

Tom Buchanan Annoys Me!

Tom Buchanan, husband of Nick's cousin Daisy in The Great Gatsby, is a very irritating character. Upon first introduction of him in the first chapter, the reader knows their in for a real ire when Tom's in the scene. When Nick first notices him on his porch, he says smugly, "I've got a nice place here". It gets worse from here. Tom shows up in the most unruly places throughout the story, and, most of the time, doesn't even acknowledge Nick's existence, as if he's richer and better than everyone else. He also acts as if he doesn't care what happens to anyone but himself. He really doesn't mind the fact that his wife is alone with Gatsby; most men would be concerned if their wives were alone with another man, a single man at that. Whenever people he knows are being mistreated, he doesn't defend them; this is present in the scene where the people he's with sarcastically invite Nick and Gatsby to dinner, and he just sits back and watches. Although Tom is a very frustrating character, the author may have written him this way on purpose.

There are metaphors and symbols all over F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing; Tom Buchanan may very well be a symbol in this novel. He symbolizes the typical person in the Roaring Twenties: a wealthy, well-known man who parties, day and night, and doesn't really care what happens to other people, only himself. Fitzgerald may have written him as a frustrating person to get the readers of his novels to see that this is not the way Americans can live and still be considered as "a model for other countries". The United States is the only country to successfully overthrow a monarch, we are supposed to be a model. He may not symbolize Americans but just America in general, implying that America is becoming a nation of partying and apathy instead of the hard work and liberty that shaped the "American Dream" decades before. Whichever he is a symbol of, one thing remains certain: he's a very annoying character.