Mandel's Nine-11: The Revelation Of The Station Eleven

Xiyu Cheng
Professor Fitzsimmons
Writing 39B
2 May 2016
The Revelation of the Station Eleven The Station Eleven happens to be published at the thirteenth anniversary of the Nine-Eleven terrorist attacks, the two elevens simultaneously reminding people that the horrifying history of our civilization as well as the unpredictable future. Even though the Nine-Eleven incident was not even close to resemble a destruction of human civilization, but it was an alarm to remind people keep examining their own conscience, this is no doubt one of the main intentions of the Station Eleven by Mandel. Throughout the entire novel, the severe disaster setting is not unfamiliar, but in this particular post-apocalypse genre novel, Mandel chooses to focus on the

After that, various kinds of civilization like advanced technology, socialization, educational resource are crumbled. It is clear that the Station Eleven still possesses several conventional traits of post-apocalyptic novel, therefore the novel certainly can be classified as a classical post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. For any fan of science fictional novel, the doomsday setting of Station Eleven is nothing new or exciting, the fictional pandemic called Georgia Flu spreading all over the global which affects and kills over ninety-nine percent of the entire human population. The origin of the virus is untold by the author, but it is safe to assume that the reason behind the pandemic is the expanding ambition of human using technology to dominate nature. After the disaster, the absence of electronic makes the civilization to regress thousands of years, the author uses writing technique combining long parallelism sentences with simple words to mimic a sensation of emptiness and distance, also the multiple narrative is perfectly fit to tell a story which develops and evolves in over 30 years. Even if someone has only known hundreds of English words, they can still be able to experience the tenderness and bitterness of a collapsed civilization. This is one of the major breakthrough of Mandel, which she subverts the complex and

Of course, music is one of them. In fact, in Station Eleven, Mandel writes that people play classical music and perform Shakespeare in order to relax themselves. Jane Collingwood argues that, “Listening to music can have a tremendously relaxing effect on our minds and bodies, especially slow, quiet classical music. This type of music can have a beneficial effect on our physiological functions, slowing the pulse and heart rate, lowering blood pressure, and decreasing the levels of stress hormones”. This provides enough evidences of the function of this type of classical music to show it does settle people down. Especially some extreme situation which often happen in the post-apocalyptic genre, people really need to maintain good moods to be faced with all kinds of challenges since every moment could be their ends. Imagine that somebody is not able to adjust his mood on a proper position and is driven insane by some kind of pulse, how is it going to affect the community? Due to transmission effect, there is a high possibility that more people tend to go crazy and this will lead to the collapse of the whole community. Therefore, we cannot emphasize the significance of the music too much in the post-apocalyptic genre. In many similar post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, the goal of the survivors is to restore civilization by utilizing