Previous
Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Monster, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dehumanization and Racism
Lies and Self-Interest
Endemic Violence
Injustice
Summary
Analysis
Steve reflects that the most opportune time to cry is at night, while the lights are out, when the sound of someone “being beaten up and screaming for help” can mask the sound of one’s own sniffling, so the others won’t know that they’re weak and try to beat them up too. Steve’s room has a mirror in it, but when he sees himself it does not look like him. Nothing in jail seems real. One lives and sleeps with strangers who don’t know each other but “still find reasons to hurt each other.”
This opening scene immediately establishes both violence (through the beating) and dehumanization (through Steve’s feeling that he no longer recognizes himself in the mirror) as primary themes. Steve’s feeling that he does not look like himself suggests that he is beginning to dissociate, to lose his own concept of who he is.
Themes
The unreality of it all feels like a movie to Steve, but a movie with no real story, not like the prison movies he’s seen before. It’s a movie “about being alone when you’re not really alone and being scared all the time.” This gives Steve the idea of making a movie out of what he sees—not his actual life, just the feelings of prison. He will write it out in his notebook and set it up like he learned to do in school. He gives it the name that the prosecutor gave to him: Monster.
Steve’s screenplay operates as both a cathartic device and a way to set up an unreliable narrator, since Steve will both record events as they happen and also envision how he wished they’d happened. This adds to the novel’s shaky and uncertain exploration of truth and lies, beginning with the redefinition of himself from boy to monster.
Themes
