An Analysis Of Station Eleven By Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a novel about humanity 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 (from Station Eleven: a Novel p. 60). Despite being set in a ravaged, lackluster world, the novel still manages to encompass the essence of what it means to be fully human as an individual. Kirsten Raymonde, the first main character of the novel after the twenty year time skip, is a 28 year old woman, who first appeared at the beginning of the book as a child actress. Despite living through the tragedy of the epidemic, known as the Georgia Flu, she maintains a strong connection to the things that she perceives makes her who she is. Through …show more content…
Poetry, painting, music, drawing, etcetera, all are different types of art, and to maintain a connection to art, to self-expression and creativity, is to maintain a connection to one’s humanity. Kirsten Raymonde in Station Eleven, is an actress, as can be seen from almost the very beginning of the novel, where she is a young child in a theater production of King Lear. Skip ahead twenty years after the global pandemic that was the Georgia Flu, and she is still an actress, with a group called The Travelling Symphony. This group walks around America, going from town to decaying town, performing Shakespeare plays for the inhabitants of those places. They do this because “survival is insufficient” (Mandel p. 58). This essentially means that to be human, one must do more than just survive, and by doing the bare minimum human beings are no better than animals. No, to be human in their eyes means to have a connection to creativity and passion, to express oneself in a way that is intellectually or creatively stimulating to themselves and others. So Kirsten, in this regard, is fully human, because she chooses to do the things she loves, rather than just survive with nothing to show for …show more content…
Where there is no electricity, no easily accessed water, no computers, no phones, no internet, etcetera, it could be easy to just give up on humanity and do your best to survive. But no, the members of the Travelling Symphony, along with Kirsten, refuse to just survive. They want to remember what it means to be fully human, to express themselves, to be creative. They hold on to the past, and keep the connection to the old world that they share alive through their art, because survival, is indeed,