The last of these murders is the castaway’s own wife driven to madness by his fear of the Black Freighter, the castaway imagines that Davidstown is full of pirates who have slaughtered all the innocent inhabitants. The parallel is kept very close, throughout the Tale: Ozymandias kills three million in New York, and the castaway kills precisely three people upon arriving at Davidstown. Even the yellow of the sail is echoed by the yellow newspaper fluttering by. The shark is the same color as the Institute for Spacial Studies out of which the alien erupts. You don’t have to take my word for this, by the way. Even the shark which attacks the castaway on his raft is an allegory for the fake alien, with its giant conical body, it’s one “stained marble eye,” and its tentacles. The raft which the castaway builds, floating upon the corpses of his fellow sailors, is a metaphor for the many people Ozymandias has already killed to further his plan (especially his fellow adventurer, Eddie Blake), even before the denouement kills three million people. The Tale of the Black Freighter appears in Watchmen whenever Adrian’s scheme moves forward: when Army officials post a nuclear hazard sign on Doctor Manhattan’s quarters, reminding him of his toxicity and prompting him to leave Earth, and when Rorschach arrives at the home of Moloch, only to discover it’s a setup and the cops have the building surrounded. But as Moore’s quote at the beginning of this column illustrates, the story of an anonymous castaway who - out of a desperate desire to first save the fictional "Davidstown" from the Black Freighter and then, later, to avenge the town’s capture - is in fact a parallel to Ozymandias’s plot. To first-time readers, its inclusion in the book can seem a confusing distraction, because - while it is a horrifying and evocative read - it doesn’t seem to have any relationship to the plot. The Tale of the Black Freighter is a comic which exists in the world of Watchmen it is written by James Shea, one of the many artists Ozymandias kidnaps to create the fake alien which he uses to prank the planet. The biggest “moral dilemma” in the book is Ozymandias’s decision to save the world from nuclear armageddon by killing three million people, or “half New York.” For many readers, this becomes a test of the Machiavellian maxim, “The ends justify the means.” Is it excusable to kill three million people if, by so doing, you save the remaining population of the Earth? Thirty years after its publication, Watchmen remains one of the most publically provocative comics ever published, by which I mean readers enjoy arguing about it, or at least talking about the moral and ethical issues it seems to pose. Yeah, there's a parallel there.” - Alan Moore “Yeah, there's even a bit where I think Adrian Veidt says at the end that he's been ‘Troubled by dreams lately, of swimming towards - ‘and then he says,‘No, it doesn't matter, it's not important’ and I mean it's pretty obvious that he's dreaming of swimming towards a great Black Freighter.
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