The Plague In Whitehead's Zone One

With a world as bleak and violent as the one in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, the only way to cope with its traumas is by looking to the past. By doing so, this brings the characters in the novel some semblance of familiarity in their lives as well as reclaim some of their autonomy from the plague, which has already taken so much from them. Despite the comfort that the past provides for each character, it is essential to his or her survival to focus on the present and the zombie-infested world that exists now. Therefore, Whitehead’s depiction of New York City as a decaying and dying organism along with his description of Mark Spitz’s behavior (both during his PASD episodes and his battles with the skels) demonstrate the many flaws in the living population’s …show more content…
In fact, Whitehead often personifies much of the landscape as “a disemboweled city, spilling its entrails” (168). He continually emphasizes its mortality by identifying “the massive central-air units that hunkered and coiled on the striving high-rises, glistening like extruded guts” (5) and “pools of blood [that] gathered at the seams in the concrete wall where the brackets held the segments together, a wrinkled skin developing at the edges where they dried...becoming giant scabs” (238). This particular commentary gives the impression that the city is irreversibly hurt by the plague and incapable of revival, given the amount of carnage that Whitehead describes in each building and street. While the latter quote hints at some signs of healing, the overall assumption from this imagery is that the wounds inflicted on the landscape still festers and will continue festering in spite of the efforts of the American Phoenix. Therefore it is futile to rescue the city from the plague at this extent of