Allan Moore and David Lloyd's V For Vendetta
Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta creates through the graphic novel form a sense of the near future, yet with haunting images of the past, positioning the reader into a sense of ‘mingled exoticism and familiarity’ (Moore, 270) while blurring the lines of the real to create a surreal setting. Realism is a mode of writing that functions to create a “reality”. The graphic novel dramatizes the limits of realism by breaking the “rules” or “poetics” of realism through its multi-modal structure of the graphic form. According to Abrams Glossary Literary Terms realism: “is an elastic and ambiguous term in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact way […] In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events”.
V For Vendetta Graphic Image
For this reason, Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta departs from the “rules” and “poetics” of realism as it takes the reader from the real into the surreal through the multiple levels of modality that are presented to the reader through this graphic mode of narrative. The graphic novel is a narrative that is driven not only through the text of the novel written in each of the panels, but also through the visual acuity that the reader must perform in interpreting the use of colour and shadows to assimilate what is being viewed in each frame, as these visual layers add to how we interpret and read through image, as well they create a psychological dimension to the narrative.
As a graphic narrative, V for Vendetta creates a liminal space to demonstrate the potential locus for humankind’s destruction through fascism, and then locates hope for the future through anarchy; in doing so, this narrative takes the reader from the real into the realm of the surreal. The format of the graphic novel adds layers of inter-textual meanings through the written and visual medium.
Graphic Panels from V For Vendetta
Each panel in V for Vendetta narrates as the reader must decode the meaning through their visual acuity. The panels are differentiated through the use of dark and light and bright and muted colours to bring together both image and text. The fluid use of these narrative forms are at times observed singularly, as some panels only narrate image. How each frame is constructed impacts, directs, and situates the narrative to the reader. The use of the visual image and words in V for Vendetta reveals how the graphic narrative is multi-textual form of the novel that blurs the lines of the real as this narrative form exposes its fictional devices and lays bare the “poetics” of illusion which are produced by the graphic novel with the clashing of images with words.
As Roland Barthes articulates the contemporary writer is someone who strives for authentic writing, while knowing that all forms, all modes of writing will eventually be assimilated by and into Literature (24, Barthes/Allen). This is precisely what the graphic novel offers to its reader as it articulates progress within thought, but also in the world as its literary form is the literal clash of the long prose narrative that was novel with that of the graphic image. The result is this new third term known as the graphic novel, the synthesis of both the image and the written word, therefore the graphic novel is a dialectic mode of writing in which to counter and present literature.
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Allen Moore and David Lloyd’s collaboration in V for Vendetta creates a novel that exposes two forms of narrative with graphic images and fiction. The graphic novel form not only challenges the “poetics” of realism through the use of image and text, but it also reveals how the graphic narrative operates as a multi-textual form of the novel. This narrative form exposes its fictional devices and lays bare the “poetics” of illusion which are produced by the graphic novel with the clashing of images with words.
Abrams, M.H. Glossary of Literary Terms. 9th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Learning, 2009.
Barthes, Rolland and Allen, Graham. Routledge Critical Thinkers Series. London: Routledge Publishing, 2004.
Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics, 2005.
Cultural Ideology and Identity 