Zone One Paper
What are Zombies? Zombies are the undead. Essentially, they were people. They used to have thoughts and feelings and hopes for the future. Now, they are monsters. They know nothing but the need to bite and feed. They lumber around mindlessly, almost aimlessly, rotting in wait for their next victims. They are hungry, but needlessly so since they have now life to sustain. Their hunger is mere greed: the unyielding desire to consume. At their core, they are a virus seeking to spread. Each victim is an opportunity to advance the epidemic. In Whitefield’s novel zombies are all of these and more. They serve the functions one would expect in a horror novel, but Whitehead uses them to reflect the greater theme of the book: the dissonance between nostalgia and the present. Zombies embody that fear of learning that something you once cherished is now a monster, that unexpectedly and without your say-so, the future that you had anticipated for something or someone belonged to something else.
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In Zone One zombies are either skels or stragglers. Skels are everything you would expect of a zombie, rotting corpses with gnashing teeth. On the other hand, stragglers are an unfamiliar breed of zombie. They are the dead who have wandered their way back to where they remember being alive, compelled to reenact some moment in their history. Along with stragglers, Whitefield does something else unfamiliar with zombies: he humanizes them. From the very beginning of the novel, we do not see these zombies as simply monsters, rather they are former humans. Mark Spitz and the other sweepers recognize that skels had lives before this, and they play games to guess what significance a place might have had to a straggler when they were