John Mandel Station 11 Analysis

Holding onto the past can be difficult, which in turn, makes it easy to forget. Nevertheless, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel highlights the significance of preserving memories in order to understand oneself and maintain humanity’s history before the devastation. When the Georgia Flu decimates the human population, memories of the past become an important pursuit for the protagonist, Kirsten Raymonde, as she faces many hardships in the post-apocalyptic world. Due to her trauma, she chooses to forget her past as a method of coping with the reality. However, her memory loss triggers the pursuit of her identity and understanding of the pre-collapse world, which is depicted by her constant search for connections to Arthur Leander, her only

When people ask her about what she remembers from the pre-collapse, she always admits that she cannot remember but she is grateful for that. The novel mentions that Kirsten was very young when the Georgia Flu hit and she left with her older brother to survive. Moreover, she and her brother walked on the road for the first year after the apocalypse, as mentioned in her interview with Francois Diallo, a librarian. When Diallo asks her to recount the memories from that year, he was surprised by this answer because she said that she was nine years old at the time. However, he responds by saying, “Well, the shock would have been considerable” (195). Kirsten was not young enough to forget everything, as she says, which leads to the thought that she must have experienced something traumatic. His response to Kirsten’s apparent memory loss hints that she experienced trauma while on the road. After Diallo’s comment, Kirsten says, “…I think that means I can’t remember the worst of it…but my point is…doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?” (195). Since she cannot remember what happened during Year One, she assumes that it was something bad. Nevertheless, she reflects on the idea that people who have the most recollection of the pre-collapse world struggle the most with the post-apocalyptic world. Consequently, Kirsten implies that it was for the best that she cannot remember. Otherwise, she believes that she would also struggle with living in the new world if she held onto her past like many others. Additionally, her interview with Diallo shows that she often questions her own fragmented memory about the existence of pre-collapse technology such as refrigerators and the reason for her scars. Through this, it is evident that she experiences a different form of struggle with self-identity due to her