Kilroy sightings
Already There
The ultimate Kilroy sighting was the one that seemed impossible: wherever a serviceman arrived, somebody named Kilroy had somehow beaten him there.
The Joke Becomes the Legend
Accounts of the wartime phenomenon describe American servicemen deliberately putting the message in unexpected places. The repetition transformed a simple name and phrase into a fictional super-GI who had always arrived first. That joke explains why stories about increasingly impossible Kilroy sightings became part of the tradition.
Tradition · Interpretive conclusionThe ubiquity of the graffiti — rather than any single location — is the final sighting. Kilroy’s defining destination was wherever the next serviceman happened to arrive.
