Watchmen Essay

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With experience comes information and awareness. Every person interprets experiences differently, which in turn makes it difficult to determine the morality of something. In Alan Moore’s novel, Watchmen, Moore uses the marriage between pictures and words to present the different personalities of various characters and what they think is best for society. Throughout the story, Alan Moore explains that ignorance is humility and humility is wisdom, which is the only way of achieving true knowledge.
The most interesting character in Watchmen is Walter Kovacs, also known as Rorschach. He grew up with an extremely abusive mother and without his father, who he knew very little about. Kovacs was also bullied as a child, thus ruining his faith in other people. In this case, it was not Kovacs that voluntarily ignored optimism, he was forced to live and grow up in (what seemed like) Hell-on-earth. That whole experience just turned him into something different that no one had ever seen, something fierce and emotionless. Like he said, “Saw the world’s black underbelly and never surrendered. Once a man has seen, he can never turn his back on it.” The moment he truly turned into Rorschach was when he found out about what happened to Kitty Genovese. She was raped, tortured, and killed while almost 40 neighbours did nothing to help. Instead of trying to get his life to a point where he had a 9-5 job and a family to take care, he focused on what he thought was right; punishing criminals for the horrible things they have done, no questions asked. For example, after finding the hideout of a man who had kidnapped a child, Kovacs realized that the bone the two German Shepherds were fighting over was a human bone; the little girl had been fed to the dog...

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...fore you leave… I did the right thing, didn’t I?” Assuredly, what he believes in was derived from his ignorance that turned into this “extraterrestrial threat” project.
Watchmen introduced and described all of the special personalities of each character and put them through life-or-death situations. Rorschach responded with the new person that he developed himself through rough times, ignoring the fact that there are actually good people out there. Dreiberg responded with his love for costumed heroes ever since he was a kid by dressing up as the Nite Owl, ignoring the fact that what he does for the community is worthless. Adrian Veidt was the one to start all of this trouble, believing that he could do so just because he was such a success. Importantly, each one of these characters acquired knowledge their ignorance being humility and their humility being wisdom.

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