Station Eleven Form and Structure

Station Eleven has a particularly odd way of presenting its story.

We start from what we think is the beginning, but really is simply the centerpoint that provides purpose for the entire narrative, namely the death of a famous film actor dying on the stage playing King Lear.  This is the centerpoint in the story, as from this point the story goes both forwards and backwards through the eyes of several main characters who in fact never meet.

With the actor, Arnold Leander’s death literally comes the end of the world.  A superflu strikes the civilized world, with the story literally following Arnold Leander’s decent and then fall from the hollywood scene and then with his death, leaping into a scenario where most everyone is dead, almost in the structure of people recovering after a familial loss.

The story follows each character’s “coming of age.”  Margaret, Leander’s first wife, goes through an arc where she starts the story simply drifting through life, depending on her steady boyfriend for moral support.  After not doing well as a “hollywood wife” and realizing that her husband is growing tired of her she divorces him, becoming a high powered businesswoman.  Through her we learn about Arthur Leander as a person but also learn about Margaret as she comes into terms with how she wants to live her life.  She draws a comic book that is only given out twice, thus influencing two other primary characters.

Other characters are simply affected by Arthur’s death, with Kirsten, a child of eight at the time of Arthur’s death and having experienced it first-hand, in her own way grieving over his death along with the entire world as she travels the world as apart of a traveling group of performers who preform orchestral arrangements and Shakespearean plays.  Her story is that of, in a way, carrying on Arthur’s profession of stage actor and in her way coming to terms with not only his death, but the death of the previous world state.

Other characters are introduced, each telling a bit of Arthur’s story as well as their own as each are affected by Arthur Leander in some way, in both past and present.