As I was finishing the last chapter of Watchmen on Saturday morning, my doorbell rang. How terribly coincidental it was to see two members of a local Baptist church on my doorstep, hands out-stretched to give me a pamphlet that read, “The Most IMPORTANT Thing You Must Consider… Where Will You Spend All Eternity?” What hilariously magnificent timing! Just then, a fleeting thought crossed my mind- was this a sign from God? It got me thinking how Alan Moore employs a generally “godless apocalypse” (to use Kirsch’s phrasing) in his doomsday graphic novel, but creates some rather godlike characters. Rosen discusses this in her essay, mentioning three characters that act as apocalyptic gods. For this post however, I would like to stick to the comparison of just two of those characters and their relation to apocalyptic time and predestination: Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan) and Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias). Jon and Veidt are known to play on the same team, yet they become two opposing forces in this concept of time.

Jon is the most obviously godlike being who is a clear allusion to Jesus. Killed in a laboratory accident, he comes back to life in an all-knowing, all-powerful, super-human form. He transcends both space and time in ways that the other characters cannot understand. Yet, he becomes simultaneously restricted by time and its connection to predestination. Jon’s sense of time is indeed kairotic. There is no defined past, present, or future. Rather, he experiences them all simultaneously. Because of this, he essentially knows the outcome of events that have yet to be experienced by the humans around him. In other words, he knows our future. However, if he has the power to know the future, shouldn’t he have the ability to change it? Or at the very least, wouldn’t he try to change it? For Jon, the answer is no. Instead, he acts out the predestined future like a scripted play. When answering an angered Laurie, who asked the same questions I just asked, Jon answered, “We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.” With Jon’s character, Moore hits on many of the ironies and contradictions involved in apocalyptic thinking. If everything is already predetermined, what’s the point of attempting salvation? Why did those Baptists come knocking on my door when it’s not even in their power to help people reach heaven? With this thinking, even every heroic attempt by the costumed heroes seems futile because they could never be able to change the predestined outcome. Jon’s disconnect from human society and finite outlook on the future leaves us without much hope.

On the other hand, Adrian Veidt represents a hopeful symbol of the future. He acts as a force that tries to overcome the limitations of time that Jon is so conflicted with. While every character in Watchmen can do no more than anxiously wait for the catastrophic nuclear war that would essentially “end the world,” Veidt plans to stop it. His plan succeeds, but not without questions of morality. As Rosen explains, these moral conflicts do not allow any of the characters to be “right” or “wrong.” Because of this, no one character can be the hero (30). This is especially true of Veidt. His clearly utilitarian philosophy lead him to murder a good deal of people for the “greater good.” Who can say whether or not it was “right” of him to sacrifice those half a million New Yorkers to save the rest of the world? Thus, he becomes a symbol of hope NOT because he represents a hero that saves the world, but because he shows us that we can act to change a future that seems unchangeable.

These two characters are key to understanding the themes of time and predestination in Watchmen. Whereas Jon can see the future, Veidt can control it. At first I was skeptical of this idea, questioning whether Veidt indeed changed the future, or whether that outcome was just part of the predestined plan. However, if we look back to the story, Jon’s vision of the future at that moment was disrupted because of what he claims was due to tachyon interference. Perhaps this is because of my hopelessly hopeful attitude, but my interpretation left me to believe that that part of the future was unclear to Jon because Veidt was changing it. Moore employs this uncertainty to purposely leave things up to interpretation. He wrote this novel as a foundation to help us reach our own rational conclusions, as the last sentence implies. “I leave it entirely in your hands” (Chapter 12, page 32).

As an aside, I just wanted to express how much I loved reading this book! It was brilliantly constructed and gave me new respect for graphic novels. I am definitely going to read his other books!