Steven Harmon, he is the protagonist of Monster. The novel starts off with Steve writing about the best time to cry and all of this stuff he is experiencing. He is a 16 year old African-American on trial for the murder of a drug store owner. He acts nervous in the courtroom when the antagonist of the novel, Bobo King gives him a dirty look. King is the other young man who is accused of taking part of the crime.
We have a system in place that is meant to serve the American people and incarcerate those who are a menace to society. A system like this seems good on paper, until the people in the system and those who contribute to it, taint it with their bias. We see this predominantly evident in the story written by Walter Dean Myers “Monster” and the documentary “Murder on a Sunday Morning”. Though these things show us the same theme, they have their individual differences separating them.
The book Monster by Walter Dean Myers is about a 16-year-old named Steve Harmon, who is on trial for murdering a man in a drugstore. The author shows that Steve is being judged by how he looks. How he looks shouldn’t matter because all of us are human beings; We all make mistakes and do things that are similar. First, the main idea of the story is that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
The book ended ambiguously and left the reader to question whether or not Steve was truly innocent. Because of the numerous questionable scenes/parts in the novel, I believe that Steve Harmon is guilty of being a participant in the crime that led to death of Mr. Nesbitt. Would a man who was innocent continuously change his story? Steve’s statements regarding his whereabouts and what he was doing on the day of the murder is inconsistent. Steve stated that he just went inside
In the world, minorities are often stereotyped and profiled unfairly. The novel “Monster” by Walter Dean Myers, portrays this by showing how quick people are to judge a young black male. In the book, Steve Harmon, a black sixteen-year-old, is on trial for supposedly participating in the robbery that resulted in the murder of store owner, Mr Nesbitt. Steve is arrested and detained in absolute isolation while having to undergo everyone’s, including his parents’ harsh critiques. Despite being found not guilty, Steve continued to be profiled as a monster and will never be treated as a teenager anymore.
Crane’s short story, The Monster, is about how Henry Johnson, the coachman, severely burns his body in the attempt to rescue the Dr. Trescott’s young son, but rather than receiving high acclaims within the town, he is ridiculed for his burnt face and disabilities. While Henry Johnson losing his face is quite a loss, the real loss is the mask every townspeople had prior to the house fire. When the townspeople lost their mask, it revealed the true face of how unkind they are towards those who look or act different than the social norm. Judge Hagenthrope speaks to Dr. Trescott in reference to Henry Johnson, “No one wants to advance such ideas, but somehow I think that that poor fellow ought to die,” revealing that some people within the town
“Monster” by Walter Dean Myers is an amazing book and a great show of Author’s Craft. In the book, he uses many different techniques to achieve specific goals. He uses description to create the setting, Flashbacks to provide context, and Inner thinking to build the mood. First of all, Myers uses Description to create the setting. He does this by arranging the book into a movie script format that tells the reader what is going on in a certain scene in the book.
This is shown when he is caught trying to steal a quarter from a pizza shop and buy food with it where he is caught by the cook. The cook speaks with him and then he is soon picked up by a police officer, but when asked why he ran away from home he never gave away everything about his mother, he could have told the police officer everything she has done but he kept quiet and was picked up by his father and they just stated it was a misunderstanding. Also at the very end of the second novel when he is talking with his mother on the phone before leaving for the Air Force, he could have expressed his anger and say how terrible she was but he did
The father’s wife had recently died, leaving him with the boy to take care of with the only mindset of keeping him alive, doing anything for their survival. This affected the father in a big way, leaving him with little hope and hardly any reason to stay alive, but the boy was “his warrant” (McCarthy 5) , his only reason for life. The boy starts out very scared and weak, always wanting to hide behind his father, knowing that one day he will die. The boy matures with every event that happens, and he maintains to have hope throughout most of them. “The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.
Steve’s judgment of his actions is similar to a pendulum swinging. Although Steve believes within himself that he is innocent, of the important people around him, make him insecure as to the degree of his innocence and turn to others for confirmation. Steve Harmon, the defendant, is faced with an internal conflict that questions his self-identity and his character in relation to the crime.
to still keep established pace and tone, which is that calm, disassociated mood. At this point the father, the reader might think, is a construction of the husband’s mind, because the husband had focused on “the idea of never seeing him again. . . .” which struck him the most out of this chance meeting, rather than on the present moment of seeing him (Forn 345). However surreal this may be in real life, the narrator manages to keep the same weight through the pacing in the story to give this story a certain realism through the husband’s
Molly Childree Fleischbein EH 102.147 Draft February 5,2018 Our world is full of monsters, some imaginary, but most are legitimate and terrifying. In his text “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, Jeffery Jerome Cohen examines the use of monsters in literate and cinema. Cohen makes the claim that the use of monsters, historically and presently, in forms of entertainment symbolizes more than just the fear they instill in audiences. A monster is no longer just a monster.
After Steve’s father visits him in prison, Steve writes this in his notebook about what his dad’s reaction was, “It’s like the man looking down to see his son and seeing a monster instead”(Myers 116). After seeing his dad act this way as Steve describes it, we can see that he feels like he has disappointed and let down his own father. In both examples, we can see that during the trial, Steve has felt disappointed in his chances and
The Monster’s Nature “For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; I still desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?” (Chapter 24, 240)
It was there morbidity. This was the real issue between us as it had been between her and my father,”(45). James’s mother is desperate to cure her son of his lies, so much as she doesn’t realize that she is hurting him. James’s mother is distraught and is upset with the fact that he is an outsider and unlike his other siblings. Because his mother does not understand his problem James is yearning to get away from her and find out who he can be without being under the influence of her.
