Monster and the Beat Generation

Monster and the Beat Generation

            When choosing to pair Walter Dean Myers’ Monster with a canonical text, I decided that I wanted to stray from the obvious. I did not want to pair Monster with Frederick Douglass or another slave narrative because I feel that it is unjust to simplify the thematic intricacies of this novel into a modern-day slave narrative that assumes that Steve Harmon’s ancestry stopped in 1863, or that the color of his skin is the only defining factor for his tragic situation. The story of Steve Harmon is not a trope about a black man who finds himself in jail. Steve Harmon’s story is bigger than himself: it is a story about growing up on the urban, New York streets; it is about watching young men with great potential fall into bad situations; it is about a clash of cultures that suppresses intelligent minds and opportunity until an entire demographic feels like giving up, worthless, dehumanized, angry, like monsters. It is about presenting a text in a nonconventional way, a way against literary tradition, explaining what happens when mainstream culture and the political system fail to see value in a person and so that person fails to see the worth in themselves. For these reasons, I would consider pairing Walter Dean Myers’ Monster with Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, part 1.

            The first thing that I considered in this pairing is location. Instead of paring Monster with a poem about someone who lived below the Mason-Dixon line, or a narrative depicting life one-hundred years ago, I decided to use a poem showing life in a similar New York borough in a time period that is not so removed. Howl was written in 1955, a time period after WWII in which a large amount of people began to take up residence in the urban sprawl. Moreover, this is a time in which the new urban setting has started to see the blending of cultures that was otherwise unheard of. Ginsberg presents a scene in which a generation was “dragging themselves through negro streets” (3) as they clashed with “angelheaded hipsters” (5) all while “contemplating jazz” (10) showing the strange new dichotomy of cultural acceptance among the culturally rejected. It should also be noted that Howl uses very intricate descriptions to depict the darkness that can surround the environment Steve knew to help the reader fill in the gaps of Monster’s narrative. Because Monster is told almost entirely through dialog, the reader is only given very small, very innocent snapshots of Steve’s life with almost no description. Howl, on the other hand, is description with no narrative. Therefore, Howl could be used to supplement Monster by adding an environment that is important but unseen.  

            It is true that Steve Harmon does not come from a broken family, but his story depicts a threat that will leave his life broken forever. Ginsberg’s Howl is, at its roots, a story of how the “best minds of [his] generation” (1) were “destroyed by madness,”(1) but that madness comes in many forms and is displayed as “messy” as the generation itself. The madness here may stem from a societal suppression, but it consumes the person until the are locked inside of their own head. Steve is threatened with the possibility to spend the rest of his life in jail. Even within the first few pages, Steve looks for ways to trap himself in his own mind because he too is being locked out of society. If this continues, Steve will resort to madness as well. Think of Steve Harmon as one of the great minds of his generation: he may not be a musician or a poet, but Steve is the artist of his time, he is the filmmaker. Now this filmmaker is being threatened to be destroyed by madness. When discussing those great minds that were destroyed by madness in Howl, Ginsberg writes, “who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams,/ woke on a sudden Manhattan,” (97-98)which similarly describes Steve’s situation wherein he uses his sordid movie, as his own dream to escape the reality of waking up suddenly in the Manhattan Detention Center. Monster, therefore presents the anxiety of the next generation that may end up being great minds living the same kind of broken life as those described by Howl.

Likewise, society today is prone to see prisoners today the same way that Ginsberg’s society viewed the homeless, the drug-addicts, and the otherwise poor. It is a tendency to dehumanize something that is misunderstood so that it can then be ignored or treated poorly. In this way, think of these two titles as being similar as well. Steve is called a monster by the prosecuting attorney and spends the rest of the novel trying to understand what it means to be a monster, to be less than human. Howl is a poem about the pent up frustration and anger towards those who have deemed brilliant people as less than human. If a human were to express his anger, he would scream, but if a monster were to express its anger, it would howl.

            It is also worth noting that the format of both Howl and Monster are very peculiar for their time. Howl was written in an era that was not used to poetry being displayed in a stream-of-consciousness, minimal punctuation storm of explicit content. Its structure was strange and its content was taboo. Similarly, Monster is written as a screenplay—a format that shouldn’t even make sense—and discusses controversial themes of social injustices. Its structure is strange and its content is taboo.

            It may seem like a student who is on the reading level of Monster is going to be unable to comprehend the many complexities of Howl, and this may be entirely true. However, I do not suggest that the entirety of Howl be given to every single student for an independent read. To present this canonical text, I would suggest using a large amount of group work as well as breaking up the original text. Students on this level will benefit from an in-depth analysis of a few select sections from Howl more than if they were forced to understand it line-by-line. Moreover, I believe that reading a low vocab, high content book such as Monster beforehand will make it easier for students to grasp larger concepts by relation (use the YA book as scaffolding to reach the canonical text). I understand that this pairing seems strange, but it is imperative to understand that texts to be paired with this YA book do not have to be a slave-narrative, and do not necessarily have to be tied to race at all. Give YA books, and students, the options they deserve.

Works Cited

Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Poetry Foundation. N.d. Web.  9 June 2016.

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. New York: Harpercollins, 1999. Print.