60 pages • 2 hours read
Alan MooreV for Vendetta
Alan MooreFiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Atmosphere
The novel’s atmosphere is dark, both literally and figuratively. Much of the action takes place at night, and Lloyd’s illustrations contain extensive shadowing and chiaroscuro. At the beginning of the novel, the illustrations’ darkness evokes the oppressive and suppressive nature of the Norsefire regime. When Lloyd is illustrating scenes of the city and populace, he often uses birds-eye angles and pulled-back perspectives, which are heavily inked and shadowed. This illustrative technique mimics the pervasive atmosphere of Norsefire’s surveillance state at all hours of the day.
Toward the end of the novel, the dark atmosphere symbolizes the unknown. In the final panels of Book 3, Finch follows the M1 highway away from London, toward the north of England; these panels are almost entirely dark. Like the rest of the country, Finch must enter the unknown and decide what to do with it. By denying Helen’s offer to build a new order with her and instead walking willingly into the dark, Finch is choosing to embrace the new future that V has shown them.
Genre
V for Vendetta breaks genre conventions to revolutionize the graphic novel genre and adheres to genre conventions to use its visual medium for world-building. The novel’s most substantial genre subversion is its omission of all sound effects and thought bubbles. Moore and Lloyd wanted to create a challenging and experimental graphic novel for adult readers. As such, they excised these common conventions typically seen in comics. The result is a bleak and realistic graphic novel with large sections of meaningful dialogue.
Lloyd’s comic panels are drawn in neat, equal squares. Each page is divided into three rows of panels, most rows contain two or three individual illustrations, and no dialogue bubbles escape their panels. This structure is precise, linear, and prescribed. As such, the conventional layout mimics the overly controlled and structured existence of people living in fascist London under Norsefire.
Allusion
V has preserved many works of art, music, and literature that Norsefire has sought to wipe out in its pursuit of cultural hegemony. V’s most outstanding characteristic is his lack of individual identity. Therefore, he often lets his allusions to these objects speak for him. He does this with such frequency that it eventually draws Evey’s frustrations: “If that’s another…it is, isn’t it? It’s another bloody quote! I’ve heard it on the jukebox!” (223) She sees his allusions as riddles to solve rather than remnants of cultures past. V's costume itself is an allusion to Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, which sought to blow up Parliament; his frequent reference to Enid Blyton’s Land of Do-As-You-Please alludes to his vision of anarchy; his V symbol is an allusion to the anarchy symbol.
Many of V’s allusions take the form of contextually meaningful quotes that he does not attribute to their authors. Evey—and the reader—are introduced to V when he quotes William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “The multiplying villainies of nature do swarm upon him” (11). This introduces the swarming, “multiplying villainies” of Norsefire that V will spend the novel working against. When he picks a rose from his garden for the Bishop, V quotes William Blake’s 1804 poem “Jerusalem”: “I will not cease from this mental fight…Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand…‘Till we have built Jerusalem…In England’s green and pleasant land” (48). Blake was a revolutionary who opposed monarchical tyranny. By quoting this, V indicates that his fight will not end until England becomes a kind of “Jerusalem”—a heaven or holy land, free from tyranny.
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