The Role Of Last Night As A Central Motif In Zone One

Last Night is a central motif in Colson Whitehead’s 2011 novel Zone One. Apart from the day changes that slice the story into three consecutive parts, Last Night is one of the rare instances that introduces readers to any movement of time. For most of Zone One, Last night serves as the event that breaks the world into pre and post zombie apocalypse, splitting the world into a total binary; in that there is a life before Last Night, and a life after Last Night. However, Whitehead plays with the tense when describing Last Night for one specific straggler early in the novel that goes against the dominant narrative of Last Night. Instead of crafting a binary ‘before and after’, this Last Night description identifies a ‘before’ but stops just short

However, in the description of Ned the straggler Spitz only ever seeks to know of his past life. Spitz’s inner monologue is not concerned with what this straggler might have been in the present, he is wholly interested in how long that straggler had been working in this office and if he had been there so long to be aware of the other businesses that existed before this one. Spitz is interested fully in the past. Ned’s previous pre-apocalypse life is the same life that Spitz perceives in this scene, therefore Whitehead effectively crafts this straggler to be nothing more than an incarnation of their past life, or, simply put, the apocalypse left them unchanged. More interestingly however, is the fact that Ned is not the only straggler described in this way, as a matter-of-fact Whitehead precisely describes all stragglers as being stuck in a state of paralysis (61-62). Knowing this means that similar Last Night narratives for all stragglers exist, yet the question naturally remains as to why Whitehead would place such a distinction for Last Night between the survivors and the stragglers of Zone

“They had lost contact because the black tide had rolled in everywhere, no place was spared this deluge, everyone was drowning” (312). Knowing this, it could be argued that both the skels and stragglers of Zone One are symbolic of people of color in the United States — on a broader scale, even the entire west. In addition, with Last Night signifying such a world altering event, Whitehead is displaying to readers that even in the face of an ‘apocalypse inducing’ event most lives for people of color remain unchanged as the systems of oppression persist. Looking towards a circumstance such as post-civil war reconstruction in the United States — alluded to many times in Zone One — this becomes clear. Even after a conflict that resulted in the emancipation of slavery, the systems of oppression only shifted into new personifications leaving most emancipated peoples’ lives unchanged. In Zone One, even with the events of Last Night the stragglers’ lives remain almost the same, specifically within in zone one itself and the reconstruction process. With a simple yet careful choice in diction and tense in the scene, Whitehead infers this continuity from Last Night without outrightly stating