# 7: Monster, by Walter Dean Myers

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon is on trial for murder. The prosecutor calls him a monster, and accuses him of being the look-out during a robbery in which a shop owner was shot dead. (Steve isn't accused of doing the shoting, but any participation in a crime involving a murder can get a person charged with murder.)

In jail and miserable, Steve alternates writing a diary with dramatizing the events in a screenplay. And that is the only perspective we ever get on the events: the diary, which Steve knows the prosecutor might read and use against him; and the screenplay, alternately attempts to glamorize and humanize his own life.

This intense novel is remarkably readable despite the unusual format, which I normally find very hard to plow through. Given the inherent possibilities for unreliable narration, I was positive that there would be a surprise ending of some sort. There was, sort of, or at least not an ending that I expected. It turned out to be more about emotion and less about plot than I had expected; I thought it was satisfying emotionally, but I really wanted to know just how unreliable Steve's version of events was, and unless I missed something, the ending doesn't indicate that at all.

A well-written, ambitious, meaty novel, but not one I'd be likely to re-read. Since I couldn't be sure how much of what Steve wrote was genuine and how much was a clever attempt to get himself off the hook or lie to himself, I never really connected to him.

Click on the link to buy it from Amazon:

Monster



How did the rest of you interpret the ending? I took it to mean that Steve was guilty (which I had never doubted), but I'm not sure what to make of his state of mind at the end. Were the movies an attempt to really understand himself and what happened, or just more presentations of images of himself to the world, like a hall of endlessly reflecting mirrors?

The surprise endings I expected and didn't get: 1) Steve pulled the trigger himself. 2) Steve and James King were the same person!

Comments

[sanguinity]

I need to re-read it to even remember what the ending was. (I remember it being GOOD, but I don't remember what it was -- care to drop me a screened or otherwise-spoiler-protected-from-others comment to remind me?) That said...

I adored Monster, and adored it because of the unreliable narrator, and the unresolvedness as to whether he was guilty or not.

Re unreliable narrators, every single character in this book is unreliable, and most of them explicitly so. Everyone lies, even the lawyers, even the judges. Everyone. And that's one of the book's strengths, in my opinion -- it's not just people in jail,facing down a life-in-prison sentences, who are cagy about the truth, but people who are allegedly respectable bastions of society are also habitually cagy about the truth. Generally speaking, you don't know what's going on, not for reals. You just have layers upon layers of ellided and skewed versions of truth. And everyone thinks that their own ellisions are justified.

(I find it especially appropriate in a courtroom novel. Ever served on a jury? Good luck getting any better sense of what ACTUALLY happened than you got out of Monster.)

Re whether or not Steve was guilty, the real question in my head is whether he's guilty enough. I think the book is pretty true to the reality that guilt and innocence are pretty difficult to define crisply, and that Steve definitely had a mix of guilt in some things and innocence in others. If we knew exactly what happened in the convenience store, it'd collapse the superimposition of guilt and innocence (if I can go all quantum-mechanicsy) and we'd be able to say "Oh, he's guilty" and mentally erase the ways in which he was innocent. Or vice versa. As it is, we don't get a guilt/innocence resolution, and thus have to sit with the superimposition of both: he's innocent, and he's guilty, both all at the same time.

Basically Monster did a really good job of hitting my narrative kinks, and hitting them hard. Obviously, your mileage varied.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

My personal issue with the question of Steve's guilt is that I disagree that being a participant in a robbery makes you morally guilty of murder if you had no idea that a murder would be committed and didn't do it yourself. So while I did think he was the lookout, I didn't care all that much whether he was or not, because to me, that's just not that bad of a thing to do compared with actually pulling the trigger.

Given that, the ambiguity didn't connect much emotionally with me.