Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a novel about humanity, specifically what can be seen as its death. After it has been ravaged by a monstrous flu that wiped out a loosely estimated “ninety-nine point nine nine percent” of the world’s population, the few people that are left live in isolated communities (Mandel 60). Despite being set in a ravaged, lackluster world, the novel still encompasses the essence of what it means to be fully human. The beginning of the novel is set at a live showing of the Shakespeare play King Lear. Shortly after the tragic events of the play unfold, which involve the lead actor’s death by heart attack, the man from which we see our initial perspective receives a phone call. His name is Jeevan, and he has

After Jeevan talks to his friend, he buys several shopping cart loads of food and supplies, goes to his brother’s house, and decides to wait it out (Mandel 1-26). After these events unfold, there is a twenty-year time skip, and we get to see what the world is like after all this time has passed. Cue Kirsten Raymonde, the first main character of the novel after the skip. She is a twenty-eight-year-old woman who first appeared at the beginning of the book as a child actress in the first scene of the novel, the play of King Lear. Despite living through the tragedy of the epidemic, known by the survivors as the Georgia Flu, she maintains a strong connection to the things that she perceives makes her who she is. Through acting, something she is very passionate about, Kirsten maintains her humanity in a world that could easily take that away. To be fully human in a setting like this requires a strong connection to inner expression, and Kirsten manages to accomplish this connection wholly through her acting and her fierce connection to the past—despite the challenges she faces in a near empty

This essentially means that Kirsten and the Symphony, as a whole, are able to maintain what makes them human, even in the wake of such a powerful epidemic. Whereas the rest of the world lives in whatever squalid buildings they can, taking up residence even in old restaurants, the Travelling Symphony walks from place to place, attempting to bring some of the joys of the old world to people who would otherwise no longer be people—at least not in relation to how they were. This livelihood that they possess only attributes to a personal quest that both they and Kirsten share, to not just do what they love, but to prevent the death of what they see as humanity, and its