Student Question

What does Steve from Monster compare his jail experience to?

Quick answer:

In Walter Dean Myers's novel, Monster, Steve Harmon compares his jail experience to the prisons he has seen in movies. He switches his diary format to a third-person screenplay to process his incarceration through the lens of cinema, highlighting the importance of film structure and ideas in the narrative.

Expert Answers

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"I have seen movies of prisons but never one like this. This is not a movie about bars and locked doors," says Steve Harmon in Walter Dean Myers's novel, Monster.

Steve has been wrongly accused of murder and is in prison awaiting trial. As a great devotee of the cinema, Steve immediately compares the prison in which he is incarcerated to the many he has seen in films. He quickly switches the format of his diary to a third-person screenplay, so that he can turn his experience into the art form with which he compares it.

The structure of films and the ideas provided by films are of primary importance in Monster, providing different paradigms through which the reader can view the action. For instance, when the trial first begins, a point of maximum suspense, Steve includes a flashback to a movie he saw at his school's film club and the ensuing discussion he had with a teacher on the idea of predictability.

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