Monster: Full Book Analysis

Monster is a story about Steve Harmon, a sixteen-year-old Black prisoner awaiting trial for felony homicide. Steve is the protagonist of Monster. He narrates his own story through handwritten notes and a typewritten screenplay. The book’s multimedia format encourages the reader to identify with Steve. Because handwritten notes suggest personal and private thoughts, reading Steve’s notes feels like reading Steve’s mind. Steve’s brutal descriptions of prison life and his outbursts of anger, pain, sorrow, and panic are punctuated by capital letters, heavily underlined words, and exclamation points. Steve’s notes feel real and personal. The typewritten screenplay, starring Steve Harmon and produced and directed by Steve Harmon, recounts Steve’s trial entirely from Steve’s point of view. However, since Steve Harmon is a filmmaker, his viewpoint often changes. Steve indicates his changing viewpoint with descriptions of camera shots. The book’s format also includes a series of photographs, showing Steve wearing a black-and-white striped T-shirt. The photos are moody and introspective. Like Steve’s movie, the photos are in black and white.

The story has both a major external conflict and a major internal conflict. The external conflict understandably arises from Steve’s arrest and trial for murder. He is pitted against the justice system, a system that can be racist. If the jury finds him guilty, he will face a lengthy prison term. This conflict takes center stage in Steve’s typewritten screenplay.

While confronted with his trial, Steve faces an anguishing internal conflict. He feels isolated and alienated from his family and even society. He also grapples with his own identity. Is he an innocent young Black teen and creative filmmaker? Or is he the monster that the prosecutor called him? Who is Steve Harmon, and where does he belong? This internal conflict is at the forefront of Steve’s handwritten notes, which take the form of a personal journal.

There is no actual inciting event—an event that sets the conflict in motion—for the external conflict, as the novel opens with Steve already sitting in his prison cell. The crime has already been committed, Steve has already been arrested, and he is facing trial. It is this external conflict that has already incited his internal conflict.

The gripping events of Steve’s trial by jury develop the main plot structure of the story, but the complex plot has many threads. The central question is whether the jury will find Steve guilty or not guilty of the crime. However, another thread is whether Steve took part in the crime to some degree or whether he is completely innocent. Yet another question is whether Steve will be able to come to terms with his own actions. In the end, only the issue of the jury verdict is clearly resolved. The result is an ambiguous, somewhat disturbing story that raises deep emotional and philosophical issues.

A major obstacle Steve faces in getting a fair trial is the insidious racism present in society and in the legal system. A street tough explains that the best target for a robbery is a “getover,” a place so small that the law won’t care very much about it. One such target is the drugstore owned by Alguinaldo Nesbitt, a fifty-five-year-old Black man from St. Kitts. Mr. Nesbitt becomes the victim of the felony murder. The casual responses of the medical examiner and police detectives to the crime reveal how little the forces of law and order care about the victim.

In many ways, racism is even more obvious and a greater obstacle in the courtroom than in the community. Steve’s lawyer, Kathy O’Brien, tells Steve outright that her job is to make him a human being in the eyes of the jury, explaining that some jurors will be disposed to decide against him just because he is young and Black. The judge, the prosecutor, the defense lawyers, and most of the jurors are white, while Steve and James King, the two defendants, are Black. The State’s evidence depends on a string of witnesses who have agreed to testify in return for reduced sentences for their confessed crimes. All these dubious witnesses are Black or Hispanic. The State’s prosecutors and the two defense lawyers do not hesitate to make insinuations, assumptions, and appeals to the jury based on race. On several occasions, the lawyers and judge exchange pleasant small talk with each other as if they all belong to the same exclusive club, which in a sense they do. The presence of racism casts doubt on the arguments of the lawyers, the deliberations of the jury, and the integrity of the legal system.

Steve Harmon’s physical plight not only reflects racism and injustice but also raises serious human rights objections. Steve is only sixteen years old and has not been convicted of any crime, but he is stuck in jail with and at the mercy of older prisoners who are violent men. His experiences traumatize him and lead to a sense of alienation. Steve’s notes are loud pleas for help, which nobody hears. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that Steve Harmon tries so desperately to convince himself of his own innocence.

Meanwhile, Steve’s internal conflict rages to the point where suicide enters his thoughts. Steve’s sense of identity changes in the course of the story and in response to his imprisonment and trial. Flashbacks in the screenplay portray Steve before the crime was committed as a smart and gifted student who gets teased and bullied by street hoods and who wishes he could be tough like them. In prison awaiting trial, Steve is in denial about his part in the crime and too consumed with his own emotions to think clearly. As he observes the trial and composes a movie about it, Steve starts focusing on the facts. At the same time, he begins to identify himself with his fellow prisoners. This empathy leads Steve to some self-awareness. He realizes that, like them, he is always making excuses and talking himself out of feeling guilty.

The climax of the main plot comes when the jury finds Steve not guilty. Other questions in the complex plot remain unresolved. Careful piecing together every small clue in Steve’s notes and screenplay leads to no firm conclusion about whether Steve took part in the crime or, if he did, to what degree. There are suggestions that Steve is not innocent but no proof that he is guilty. The sympathetic reader can easily construct scenarios in which Steve refuses to take part in the crime or agrees to take part but backs out at the last minute.

At the end of the story, Steve is back at home, spending his time making movies about himself. He questions what his lawyer saw in him when she refused to hug him upon his acquittal. His internal conflict of alienation and identity has not been fully resolved.

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