I haven’t seen or read a whole lot of post-apocalyptic narratives, but several years ago I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and couldn’t help but compare it to what we have read thus far in Station Eleven. In The Road, a man and his son are traveling through a decidedly more brutal post-apocalyptic landscape than Station Eleven, with the two struggling to survive. Throughout the book, the man often thinks back to his wife and the son’s mother who committed suicide in order to escape what she saw as an inevitable end where she would be raped and murdered as they traveled. I felt particularly conflicted by aspect of the plot. While objectively for me this seemed like a reasonable decision, when reading the book I couldn’t shake a feeling of animosity towards this character, as though I had higher standards of bravery and morality of characters surviving the apocalypse. In contrast, when I read Frank’s suicide in Station Eleven, I had no sense of antipathy so I attempted to figure out why. After reflection, it was the line, “I remember thinking that I never wanted to see a war zone again, as long as I live (183),” that stuck with me. In contrast with other post-apocalyptic narratives, Station Eleven does not make out the world before the apocalypse to be a utopia. For Frank, the things he has already seen and lived through are likely just as bad as what is now happening, and this is probably the case for many people in the world. Even in a less drastic sense the pre-apocalyptic world for Arthur and even Miranda is distinctly un-idyllic. Kirsten’s reflections on the death that surrounded Shakespeare (57) also served as a reminder that gruesome deaths are not unique to the world after the collapse. For me, it was almost as though because Station Eleven recognized that the pre-collapse world was in many ways incredibly flawed, that it was acceptable for the characters to be more imperfectly human as well.
Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven : A Novel. First edition. ed., New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. 1st Vintage International ed. ed., New York, Vintage Books, 2006.