The funeral chapter of Watchmen provides a litany of polyphonic examples to analyze for narrative strands. On page 57, as the Comedian leaves the Vietnamese bar after being injured, he goes off on Dr. Manhatten for being indifferent to the feelings of human beings. He shouts that even with limitless power, Dr. Manhattan can’t develop the necessary empathy to form meaningful relationships with other humans (Moore/Gibbons, 57). With that, the Comedian drops Dr. Manhatten’s former girlfriend’s name, Jenny Slater as an example of a human relationship that he botched. This will ultimately come full circle when Jenny interrupts Manhatten’s interview later in chapter three, thereby solidifying Dr. Manhattan’s lack of concern for the affairs of humans. Although the confrontation between Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian took place in Manhattan’s flashback, it seems to predict Manhatten’s interview despite the different points of view presented.
This sequential polyphony continues into Chapter Three, in a conversation between Dan and Laurie, she vents about how emotionally exhausting it is to be with Dr. Manhattan with his waning ability to care about the human race. Laurie explains that he looks at things differently now and doesn’t dwell on mankind’s experiences. While she is crying to Dan about Dr. Manhattan not exhibiting human emotions, we see Manhatten look somewhat sad at his girlfriend’s departure through a series of alternating shots between Dan and Laurie in the apartment and Manhatten at the research facility. These two instances of sequential polyphony present the theme of Dr. Manhattan’s waning humanity through four different perspectives, two of his colleagues from the Watchmen days, his girlfriend, and lastly how we perceive Manhattan’s humanity.
Now we must apply Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony to Watchmen, and we can do this by taking a look at the secondary sources that give further context into the characters’ psyche. At the end of each chapter, the authors provide exerts from academic works, although the authors mostly do not appear in the larger graphic novel. These exerts provide yet another perspective into how the characters see themselves and the world around them. For example, at the end of Chapter Three, Holis Mason, the original Nite Owl gives his origin story and his personal reasons for fighting crime. He explains that although most of them were sometimes politically extreme, even go far as to call some of them Nazis, they wanted to make the country better. This is one, seemingly naive superhero perspective amongst a sea of other perspectives, which seems to be contradicted by another superhero Rorschach. While Rorschach is being interviewed by a psychologist, he explains his theory on why humanity is inherently rotten. He recalls an murder in which nearly 40 onlookers witnessed the event. His reasoning behind his superhero origins stem from his mask actually representing the whole of his identify, wanting to show the world how dark and evil how humanity really is while also being particularly brutal to the criminals he targets.
These two perspectives seem to contradict each other, with Holis Mason’s autobiography implying that humanity can be saved by the a group of do-gooders, while Rorschach's testimony seems to illicit what happens when extreme personalities decide to take up the masks themselves. That is, potentially becoming tyrannical masked vigilantes with a warped sense of morals.
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