Mark Spitz In Zone One Sparknotes

In the beginning of the novel, Zone One by Colson Whitehead, Mark Spitz who is the main protagonist is portrait as an “average” person and willing to survive to any circumstance that he is presented with. When the zombie apocalypse began, Spitz is one of the survivors who is able to join a team, the “sweepers”, in an effort to get rid of the Zombies who are still left to destroy and who are also taking over New York city. He also learns that he does not longer have to worry about the differences society has to face because it’s all “over”. He knows that as much as the government tries to get rid of the zombies, they will never be able to defeat them all. Throughout the book, we can see Mark Spitz reaction towards these Zombies who are the “Stragglers” and “Skels”, which are a different type of zombies.

We can make a connection from Zone One to the argument that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen makes, that zombies are an “embodiment of a certain cultural moment” (4). This means that many of these zombies are not just a meaning of disastrous diseases that transformed the people but it’s a representation of the cultural change that is happening in the modern day society. As Cohen mentions, he also agrees that “for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual” (7). Cohen explains that many times society can view one person as a “monster” such as a zombie, for being having a different mentality than most of the society, but the society does not realize that they themselves are actually the monsters and not the normal people they think they are. We can also point out on Robin Wood’s study that “monster figure often represents the return of the culture’s repressed Other”