This absence also points to a prominent motif in the book. Watchmen contains a running theme of symmetry and symmetrical images, but it is also concerned with marred or broken symmetry. Veidt is still a man, even though he becomes inhuman when he places himself above his fellow men and appoints himself arbiter of humanity's destiny. Jon Osterman, on the other hand, undergoes the process of becoming para-human . It takes the events of Watchmen for Dr. Manhattan to realize that he is no longer Osterman, or even a man.
Nothing ever ends.
Veidt is left standing alone with his shadow, a representative of man and his uneasy relation with a god who may or may not be gone for good. This opposition dovetails neatly with Moore's dissection of the superhero genre. Moore explodes the conventions of the genre by treating his characters like humans, and showing how the conditions of everyday life affect the heroes even as their actions transform these conditions. Moore's initial idea was to take an extant comics continuity and bring it closer to reality. In response, Moore and Gibbons decided to create a new set of characters one step removed from their original templates.