Marie Levesque, Comparative Literature PhD student University of Montreal Email : marie.levesque@umontreal.ca Staring into the Abyss: Rorschach’s Trauma as a Fourth Dimension and Personal Reflection(s) in Watchmen Michael Herr in Dispatches says: “[…] it took the war to teach it, that you were responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes”, cited in Caruth (181). Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen can be said to be an illustration of psychological trauma and its associated symptoms. The medium of the graphic novel plays an important role in this illustration because the characters’ vivid traumatic images are reproduced on the page, giving the reader/spectator a delayed but also a direct access to said traumatic events. A delayed access because we are simply the readers of a graphic novel, but the access remains direct because the bright drawings and texts draw us in. The graphic novel medium enables a complete reading and visual experience. In Le spectateur émancipé, Jacques Rancière states that the main goal of theatrical artists is to be able to make the passive spectator become an active part of the play which is unfolding in front of him/her (17). In the case of Watchmen, the graphic novel is the play and the readers/spectators become active participants in the unfolding of the story, not only by turning the pages, but also by becoming the receptacles of the characters’ traumatic pasts. Moreover, by being a graphic novel dealing with the concept of trauma in its multiple storylines, the idea of time is also brought forward by Moore and Gibbons. Not only does time play a major role in the unfolding and the reliving of traumatic experiences, but a specific viewpoint of time called “the fourth dimension” also engages the reader/spectator in an 1