Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven Analysis
Memory affects the way people think and what they do after an epidemic. In the novel Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, memory plays an important role for Kirsten, Clark, and François. These three characters all create and collect to live in their memories; Kirsten gets tattoos and Clark makes a museum, while François creates a library and publishes newspapers. Kirsten Raymonde, an actress who has seen death right before her eyes multiple times, gets tattoos to remember what she did. The first death she saw in front of her was on stage before the collapse.
William Stafford’s style of writing cultivated me in many ways. Throughout this piece, there has been many cliffhangers which want you to keep on reading. There were always questions such as, “what is going to happen next?” or “I wonder why this is happening.” Every question has an answer and all of mine were solved throughout the entire following of the writing.
“And Mack said, ‘That Doc is a fine fellow. We ought to do something nice for him’” (16). With this quote, the whole plot of the book of Cannery Row is explained, for it has a simple one: Mack and the boys want to throw a party for Doc. But it is because of this simple plot that Steinbeck is able to freely portray...
In Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, she frames human life under two different eras in which they undergo a pandemic. The characters are in their present life living with concerns of their past life, in which ended twenty years ago after a worldwide collapse. Mandel seems to frame human life on both sides to let the reader know how civilization becomes affected through a great catastrophe. The story shows how human life was before the pandemic and its new meaning after the event. Throughout the novel, characters find material things that connect them back to the past.
In the novel Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel creates a parallel between a pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world affected by the nation-sweeping epidemic: The Georgia Flu. This dystopian world opens up the conversation about the following unresolved dilemmas: displacement, disorientation, dislocation, alienation, and memory. Each of the main characters faces a certain level of uncertainty while fighting for survival, evidently affecting them mentally, emotionally and physically. For this reason, some readers may question Mandel's choice to have her characters continue suffering from their inner turmoils.
Some have named Ray Bradbury “the uncrowned king of the science-fiction writers” because of his imagination and beautiful way of making Fahrenheit 451 come to life. The book Fahrenheit 451 is one of the first books to deal with a future society filled with people who have lost their thirst for knowledge and for whom literature is a thing of the past. The author mainly portrays this world from the point of view of Montag, a man who has discovered the power that knowledge contains and is coming to grips with the fact that it is outlawed. However, the reader also gets to see what life is like for one of the people content in living a life lacking in independent thought and imagination through his wife, Millie.
A significant theme of Station Eleven is life and death. The text explores death on a personal but also on a universal level. On a personal level, the reader gains an insight into the life of actor Arthur Leander before he reached his death. It appears that Arthur is the character in the text that connects the remaining characters together once he has died. As a result, his death causes personal consequences and affects on the lives of those that are left behind, both in a positive and negative sense.
When thrown in a unique situation, how one reacts may not reflect their normal social behavior. In fact, it may push an individual to react in a way that could be deemed negative, regardless of having a genuine and positive nature. In the novel Station Eleven written by Emily St. John Mandel, the author explores the conflict desires between good and evil in a post- apocalyptic world. Mandel shows the conflict between good and bad through the characters of Kristen, the Prophet and the boy.
The book follows Guy Montag, a fireman who sets things on fire instead of put out fires. He enjoys his job until on one job an old woman decides to burn with her books rather than evacuate. Haunted by her death, Montag becomes confused on why books would mean so much to anyone. He then decides to find out for himself by reading books from a personal stash of stolen books. Montag has a personal revolution; he realizes the dangers of restricting information and intellectual thought.
What core elements define the essence of humanity? In Mandel’s novel, one is compelled to reconsider the defining characteristics of humanity. Mandel structures the plot of Station Eleven around the main character Arthur Leander’s life. Throughout the novel, Mandel explores a series of sub character’s perspectives of the flu pandemic and each of their roles in the post-apocalyptic world it creates, encouraging the reader to delve into the relationships between humanity and art. Book reviewer Justine Jordan from The Guardian summarizes the book perfectly by claiming that “Station Eleven is not so much about [an] apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia, and yearning” (Jordan, par. 5).
“The woman on the porch reached out with contempt to them all and struck the kitchen house against the railing” (Bradbury, 40). This peaks Montag’s interest in books, and even prompts him to steal one from the burning house to add to his hidden collection. Nevertheless the harms of censorship are eventually recognized, people become curious and want to know what 's being hidden from
Gilman also highlights a lack of identity of the narrator through the setting of the novella which reflects the narrator’s societal confinement. The protagonist is surrounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, which create a sense of separation that the narrator feels from others and the outside world. In addition, the room in which she is confined contains a “heavy bedstead, and… barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on”. These physical and ‘prison-like’ restrictions imposed on the protagonist clearly demonstrate her lack of freedom. Additionally, Gilman’s use of syndetic listing to describe the narrator’s physical entrapment is perhaps reflective of her feelings of suffocation and her inability to escape as the list feels never ending.
As Montag and Mildred talk about the books, they are distracted by the bombers in the sky. Montag goes on to talk about the lack of attention paid to the bombers: “‘We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022. Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world?... The rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are’” (Bradbury 69-70).
By creating characters in the novel who are excluded and labelled the author demonstrates how cruel society can be to people. The purpose of this essay is to show how the author reveals the experiences of marginalised characters in society. Joseph Davidson is an introverted, fourteen year old boy who feels that he is trapped within his own world of chaos, and he too is a marginalised character in the book. It is suggested by the author that other characters believe that Joseph’s mother smothers him too much and his father has
Section I functions as a recollection of memory, as the narrator recalls the funeral of Emily, describing her death as a “fallen monument”, and her life as “a tradition, a duty, and a care”, setting up the plot for later conflicts and events that exemplify her life and death as such. The section also introduces symbols of southern tradition such as “when Colonel Sartoris…remitted her taxes” to introduce Emily’s strong upholding of tradition and her connections to the few characters that have severely influenced her life and values. Section II builds upon the ideas mentioned in Section I, but takes place 30
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