It's Not All About the Looks Edited

Author’s note: I am writing about the description of the main character in the book “Monster” by Walter Dean Myers. My purpose of writing is to understand the way people look, as well as how they are treated.

When you read a book do you even pay attention to what the main character actually looks like? In the book “Monster” by Walter Dean Myers, the author demonstrated a great job of describing what the main character Steve Harmon looks like; mostly because the setting is in jail and the whole story is written out as a screenplay or diary format. In his description there is a file report of his profile which tells you all about the main character. Steve is prosecuted for robbery and murder, but to the reader, it is still unclear whether he committed the crime or not.

First of all, Steve Harmon is a young sixteen year old African American teenager who got arrested for supposedly being the look-out in a robbery that took place at a local drug store in Harlem, New York ending with the clerk lying dead. Who Steve really is, not even he knows, but within the book he rediscovers his identity. He is tall, like a skyscraper. Steve has dark brown eyes like the bark of a weeping tree in the shade, and has dark brown hair spiked up like needles sticking out of his head. Despite what he looks like, the way he is treated makes you wonder if it’s because his skin color, because he is a very nice young man, hanging out with the wrong people.

How Steve is treated is a whole other story. Think about an innocent young man being accused of being a helper during a robbery, and even a murder. This has been really hard for Steve and even though he is the main character, being on trial is not his only role throughout the novel. He is very strong inside like a little boy fighting cancer; all they can do is stay strong. I would imagine that anybody else would break down from all the pressure. Adding to that, he is still just a kid. Basically the only thing that is keeping him sane at the time is writing his life in a movie plot line on paper almost as if it were a script for a movie. This is his way of understanding and coping with everything that is happening at the time.