I Am Legend Character Traits

Robert Neville is the main protagonist throughout the novella, I am Legend, by Richard Matheson. He goes through a lot of adversity throughout the book, and much of what he experiences has a great impact on him. He undergoes many changes to his character throughout the story, and in the end he is a completely different person than he was at the start. There are a lot of different aspects of Robert Neville throughout the story, including his development, how the pandemic affected him, his behavior, his motivations, his interactions with other characters, how those interactions affected him, and his development. Robert Neville changed a lot between the start and end of the pandemic. At the start, he was stricken with grief due to his wife and

Before the pandemic, he was a regular factory worker, which is a low skilled job. The pandemic forced him to learn about bacteria, viruses and other parts of biology in order to understand how the pandemic started. The pandemic also killed his wife and daughter, which made him become a severe alcoholic, something he was not before. He also became accustomed to violence. At the start, killing the vampires and seeing the giant burning pit of dead bodies made him unable to eat. After a while he got desensitized towards it, and just accepted what he saw as a fact of life. Neville also became accustomed to being alone. He was by himself for years, and in that time he changed from needing a companion to being fine all alone. His interactions with Ruth show that he has lost his ability to lie and his voice is “devoid of warmth, that it was the harsh sterile words of a man who had lost all touch with humanity.”( Matheson

The only two characters that he had an interaction with once the pandemic came full swing were the dog and Ruth. The dog allowed Neville to gain hope again. He desperately needed the dog as he had gone without a companion for over a year. This is shown when Neville thinks to himself “Somehow, though he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog.”(Matheson 86) The dog never got very close to Neville, only coming up to the porch for food, but over the course of a few days he was able to draw the dog closer and closer. When the dog did not show up one day, Neville started to panic and started to look around for him desperately. After a few days, the dog shows back up, but it is infected. When the dog dies, it does not push Neville into a depression, it actually does the opposite, it pushes him to work harder. Neville also had interactions with Ruth. The first interactions that he had with her was when he brought her back to his house. Seeing another living, uninfected person was huge for Neville. He had gone over three years without an interaction with another human. At first, Ruth was absolutely terrified of Neville, but as they got to know each other, she warmed up to him. They even shared a moment where both of them hugged in darkness and Ruth even said that in that moment she was “not spying on you, but loving you”(Matheson 144) to