Summary Of I Am Legend By Matheson

Matheson uses the vampires in his book to prove how Americans are self-centered with regard to being civilized by showing how the vampires are minorities and uncivilized. I am Legend takes place in the 1970’s, which is around the civil rights movement, which means that blacks were being depicted as vampires to represent a minority in light of the Americans view. While Neville is the last human on earth, whom doesn’t see himself as a minority, but sees the vampires as a minority and a threat to his culture and way of living. For example, “Vampires are prejudiced against…But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men?” (Matheson 20). Whenever Neville decides to drink heavily, it allows for Matheson’s own personal …show more content…
As Neville realizes that Ruth was a hybrid vampire who managed to stay alive in the sun with a pill, he understood how he was the monster of their society by killing them in their sleep. For example, “He was an invisible specter who had left for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones…Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed” (Matheson 159). When the hybrids came to Neville’s house, he was shocked since they had broken down his door and charged right in with weapons at hand. Once being captured, he looked out the window to find the new society that Ruth had spoken of in her note. Ultimately, Neville comes to the realization that the hybrids saw him as the minority and “black terror” that threatened their way of life. Since the hybrid society was new and growing, it needed to protect itself from the savage natives who lived there; in this case the savage native was Robert Neville. During World War II after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt imprisoned Japanese Americans because America was afraid they would betray their own country so they can protect their homeland and their way of life. For example, “Eventually over 110,000 people of Japanese descent, half of whom were children and two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were removed from their homes and relocated to internment camps until the camps were closed in January 1945” (Mitchel). This quote is significant due to the fact that people of a race had to be moved from their homes to be imprisoned for a safety precaution according to Roosevelt in 1942. This act of placing Japanese Americans in internment camps is uncivilized all because of a safety precaution to make America safer, which relates