V for Vendetta: Book 1, Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

That V is on a vendetta against the Norsefire government is plain before we even open the graphic novel (it’s in the title, after all). Yet it’s still not clear why V is on this vendetta—if it’s a personal quest for revenge, or something with a broader ideology behind it.

Delia is clearly more sympathetic than Prothero and Lilliman, but she still participated in the same atrocities at Larkhill. Delia treats the patients at Larkhill just as Prothero and Lilliman do: she considers them barely human, disgusting, and altogether unworthy of being alive. Even so, Delia at least believes in the goodness of her research—she thinks that she can use her experiments to promote health for all.

We see, once again, V’s fondness for the letter V and the number 5. We also realize that V may be the product of medical experiments gone awry: perhaps he took some of “Batch 5,” and as a result became extra strong and intelligent—like a superhero.

One thinks of Nietzsche’s famous notion that “when one stares into the abyss, the abyss stares back.” Delia stares at her patients with disgust, and here, her mysterious patient returns her stare, judging Delia for her blind participation in murder.

According to the diary, we are meant to see that the man in Room V is probably V. He grows beautiful roses, just as V uses roses to mark his murders. Much as before, V uses his enemies’ weaknesses against them. Thus, he’s able to escape from prison, we can sense, because Lewis Prothero greedily demands more food for himself, and thus gives V more fertilizer.

The piles of ammonia in the man’s room are a decent metaphor for the structure of these early chapters of the graphic novel: they’re a complex puzzle that only a few people are capable of fully understanding.

Here, we run into the concept of the “unreliable narrator.” Delia seems to be explaining the state of affairs at Larkhill prison, but admits that she finds it difficult to write about the man in room V rationally. It’s also possible that V is tampering with Delia’s diary, or even that he forged it altogether. Delia’s awareness of V’s gaze suggests her awareness of her own guilt—her involvement in a horrible, genocidal experiment.

Finch recognizes the scope of the problem he and the Nose are dealing with. It’s possible that V is acting out of revenge: he wants to cause pain to the people who hurt him long ago. But it’s also possible that V is trying to cover his tracks, preparing himself for a far more dangerous and large-scale assault on the Norsefire state. Moore is a fan of the novels of Thomas Pynchon (especially V, which V reads at several points in the graphic novel). Pynchon maintains that it is better to be certain and terrified than “uncertain and paranoid”—Finch echoes these exact sentiments.

Finch knows nothing about V’s personality, and curiously enough, neither do we. We have to face the possibility that V has forged the entire diary altogether—we really don’t know anything about where V came from. Because V is totally anonymous, nothing is necessarily as it seems. As he does in many of his works, here Moore tampers with the “superhero backstory” trope.

Although V is shown to be cold and capable of murder, he’s also sensitive and emotional. We don’t know why V is weeping, but we also sense that there’s a side to his personality that Finch has yet to understand. In retrospect, we will recognize this woman as probably being Valerie.

V’s greatest weapon is his unpredictability. We see this in his maddening allusions to literature and culture of the past, and we see it as well in his mysterious assassinations of government officials. V’s very existence is an affront to the certainty and constant surveillance of “Fate” and the Norsefire state: in a world where the government knows and controls everything, V is gleefully, anarchically unknowable.