What strikes me most about Jeffrey Wu’s wonderful essay “The Greater Good: Analyzing the Morality of Watchmen” is its deft handling of sources. This essay—the capstone for our WR 150 course, “Monsters”—originally began as a proposal with a very different topic: Jeffrey wanted to write about Zach Snyder’s film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel. As he researched the critical conversation around Watchmen, though, he encountered a problem: there is an almost overwhelming amount of scholarly writing about the novel, and little to none about Snyder’s film. At the same time, Jeffrey discovered a pattern in that criticism that he decided to investigate further: critics were writing their essays about only one character in Watchmen, or setting them in parallel rather than analyzing them together. If they could not see how the characters form different pieces in a single puzzle, they could not see the puzzle as a whole; their conclusions about the book were partial at best. This observation became the kernel of the final essay.
Throughout the essay, Jeffrey demonstrates a deep familiarity with his exhibit source as well as with the critical conversation around it. Unlike many students who write about graphic fiction, Jeffrey attends to the art of Watchmen in addition to its written text; this is especially impressive in his exploration of the book’s watch motif. His startling insight that the countdown clock to the next catastrophe has been visually restarted at the end of the novel leads to his brilliant conclusion: by leaving Watchmen’s ending unresolved and its moral universe undetermined, Moore and Gibbons want to encourage readers to develop their own moral stances—and perhaps to avoid the next catastrophe in our own world.
— MARIE MCDONOUGH
WR 150: Monsters