Pandemic In Station 11

Great Essays
Station Eleven explores the idea of what it means to be human when the infrastructure of society has crumbled to pieces. Mandel achieves this by creating scenes that show how her characters are attempting to find their place as humans in the post-apocalyptic landscape. A landscape that seems to be thriving even after the loss of millions of lives. Mandel also demonstrates how these characters’ attempt to hold on to past artifacts as a way of connecting with what the world had once been. This allows the reader to make connections to how the world pre-collapse has shaped the world that resulted from the pandemic. Emily St. John Mandel develops the message that before and after the apocalypse humans continue to have the same basic human and social …show more content…
She shows many different “Times” throughout the novel, not just distinctly before and/or after the Georgia Flu. She presents four distinct time periods in Station Eleven; years before the pandemic, the day of the pandemic, year 15 and 20 into the pandemic. In order of how they appear in the novel, the period “the day of the pandemic”, is the single night in which the story opens. Where Arthur collapses on stage, Jeevan gets the call from his friend Hua warning him of what may be happening, and he begins to prepare for the end. Then the period “year 20 after the pandemic”, where we are introduced to Kirsten and the traveling symphony and given a glimpse of what the world has become after the flu. Then “years before the pandemic”, when Jeevan is still a paparazzo or entertainment journalist, Arthur is still alive, married to Miranda or Elizabeth, and friends with Clark. We see a peek of year 15 as short snippets of the interview of Kirsten by Francois Diallo. The use of these distinct time periods makes a direct connection between humanity before and after the Georgia Flu, giving the reader insight to how little the needs of humans change even when the world is now completely …show more content…
These different forms take shape both before and after the flu. After the flu, Mandel uses the many characters who were born before the collapse of the world and their memories of what the world consisted of before it turned in to nothing but struggles and small isolated towns. Many of the memories Mandel focuses on in the novel consist of different forms of art and the way it would provide comfort, even as a memory. Forms of art that were expressed in memories were music and old television shows. For example, Dieter “played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar” (Mandel 38), and August continued to talk of his lost TV and the old shows he would always watch as to escape having to make new friend as his military family continues to move. In the time before the collapse of society Mandel uses the characters of Arthur and Miranda as the key conveyers of this need. Arthur is an actor so he expresses himself by playing a multitude of personalities on stage. Miranda creates her comics, which provides her with joy, and has been a reliable constant in her life through the breakup with Pablo, and her divorce from Arthur.
In Station Eleven, Mandel uses different forms of art to represent artifacts from an old life that continue to provide meaning

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