Alexis: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Summary:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel ells the story of survival, which leads to being resourceful, determined and diligent when trying to deal with a life changing situation, such as a flu epidemic breaking out. This novel is in third person limited, where the narrators don’t know that the characters are connected, but the audience does. Part of the structure is that there are multiple perspectives following a few main characters and minor characters throughout the story. Along with the perspective switching, the timeline also switches from present to twenty years either in the future or in the past.

As stated by Laura, Station Eleven starts off by following a man named Jeevan and his girlfriend, Laura who are attending the play King Lear in a theater in Toronto. Jeevan, who is training to be an EMT, notices that one of the actors, Arthur, who’s playing King Leer, is having a heart attack and quickly tries to revive him. He then notices and tries to comfort a young girl, Kirsten, who has witnessed the death of the actor. This is before there is a mention of the flu, but when it becomes clear that the flu is worse than the hospitals thought, Jeevan is told by his friend who is a doctor “to get out of the city” (St. John Mandel 19). When he finds this out, he becomes resourceful and determined when he goes to the local grocery store and is buying all kinds of supplies he was able to think of in order to survive,

The switch in perspectives is shown in the second part of the book when the story goes from the perspective of Jeevan in the present when the flu pandemic is just breaking out to the perspective of a girl named Kirsten who is living twenty years after the flu pandemic happened. She is part of a group called the Traveling Symphony; this group goes to each of the surviving civilizations to perform Shakespeare. Robert mentions in his first blog post for this book about how “the story keeps on becoming different stories to the point that, aside from careful connections to other segments, seems more of a collection of novellas tied together than an actual narrative.” He is saying is that this story is strung together and the end of the story connects each character connected in some way, though the characters may not be aware of the connection.

The narrator gives me a hint as to what is to come in the story when all the people at the theater are discussing what has happened to Arthur and how they are going to tell Arthur’s family he has passed. St. John Mandel states, “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city” (15). I was able to get the sense that many people weren’t going to survive what was to come in the story.

As Robert and Brittany have mentioned in both of their posts about the summary of Station Eleven, it can be a little difficult to become a submissive reader with this book. The reason for this is because of the multiple perspective. As I continued on in the story, jumping between perspectives, I became be a little confused and my values that shape my beliefs, thoughts and feelings were being challenged when switching to between two characters who may not share the same values as me. For instance, in Station Eleven, I may connect more with Kirsten when reading from her perspective twenty years after the collapse happened because of the shared values, but not necessarily connect with Arthur Leander when in his perspective twenty years before the collapse.

As a group, we were reading for the mimetic register, at least for the beginning of the book. The mimetic register is mimicking reality, and throughout the novel, the narrator persuaded us to feel certain emotions while reading. We found it harder to switch to the other registers, such as the thematic or the synthetic. The thematic register deals with the themes in culture and ethics while the synthetic register is the structure and words of the text itself rather than the world that the narrator is trying to get us to become apart of.

It seems like for us, the initial “reading for” was that this book was out of our comfort zones. For me personally, I am more drawn to realistic fiction or romance fiction. The genre this book falls under is post-apocalyptic, which wasn’t a genre that we normally would have picked up. It wasn’t until the second part of the story where there is the jump in narrators and timelines that I saw the transition from being a resistant reader who is only reading because it is required for a class to a submissive reader who is reading to become part of the audience that the narrator wants me to become, who is going through the aesthetic emotions while reading.

I mentioned in my first blog post, in order to become the submissive and to be able to submit to the text, I will need to allow myself to think that this epidemic could actually happen. That in order to survive something like what is happening in the story, I would need to think of what I would do in Jeevan’s situation or even in the situations that Kristen were going through while traveling with the Traveling Symphony.

Value Graph:

This value graph seems to be the most complete out of the ones that are shown.

The values that I discussed in the value graph above had to do with how an epidemic leads to survival instincts and becoming resourceful. In  the beginning scenes of the story, Jeevan figures out that he wants to become a paramedic when he is trying to save an actor who was having a heart attack on stage at a play of King Lear. This would be positively charged. It then shifts to him finding out about a flu epidemic that is killing hundreds of people and that he needs to leave the city; this situation would be a negative charge. Jeevan goes to the grocery store to buy supplies that would help him survive, which would be positive in the sense that he is being resourceful. It becomes negative when he starts to panic, but gets positive again when he gets to his brother’s apartment to hide away from the flu.

This instinct of survival goes on throughout the rest of the story. For instance, when Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony are going to this makeshift town called St. Deborah by the Water in search of their friends who they left there a couple years back. But it is almost completely deserted the second time they came through and this kept the group hyperaware. They end up fleeing from this civilization where, as Kirsten called it, “one of those places where you don’t notice everyone’s dropping dead around you till you’ve already drunk the poisoned wine” (Mandel 63).

Genre:

The genre that Station Eleven would fall into would be post-apocalyptic fiction. As I stated in my post blog, “this genre includes elements of fear and panic, the collapse of a government, and sometimes violence. The story of Station Eleven falls under this genre because there is a flu that is widespread and ends up killing most of population. When this happens, the society as the characters know it collapses.”

The elements of the genre are shown throughout the book when the reader is following the character, Kirsten, who lives twenty years after the flu epidemic happens. There is a point in the story when she is raiding through houses that have been abandoned to find anything that may be salvageable and useful for her or her group. For instance, when her and her friend August broke into an abandoned house and, “Kirsten could almost picture this: August at nine, at ten, at eleven, pale and scrawny with dark hair falling in his eyes and a serious, somewhat fixed expression, playing a child-size violin in a wash of electric-blue light” (Mandel 39). In this passage, Kirsten is trying to remember a time when there was technology and electricity in the world before the collapse since there is no more technology.

The reason why this genre exists in the world is to evoke a sense of fear in people, especially the ones who are blind to what it is like to survive if their lives were in danger. I get the sense of this fear by having a continuous question in my head of Would I make it? Also, another reason why this genre exists is because people are typically afraid of death and through this story, the characters are defying death. It is human nature to want to strive to live.

The substantive and stylistic features of the post apocalyptic fiction genre fall under the need to be a kind of destruction in the natural order of the world. There needs to be a sense of fear and panic when there is a collapse in government. For instance, in Station Eleven, there is not only the flu epidemic that occurs, but also a loss in all technology and electricity, so all of the people who have survived in the story are trying to figure out a different way of living. For example, as the Traveling Symphony are going from one civilization to the next, they come across a school that looked like it had people in it at one point, so Kirsten and August have to break in to try to look for supplies (219). Being resourceful is one of the things that they have to learn after the collapse happened if they want to survive.

The purpose that organizes the substantive and stylistic features of this genre is to have the reader emotionally invested in the characters during the story. When I am emotionally attached to a character, I want to see the specific character survive. If I am invested in the certain character, it means that I may identify with the character. In the instance of the genre, I would identify with how this character is trying to survive and to try to answer the questions Would I make it? and How would I survive? Also, I would want to see not only how the characters will survive life after the apocalypse, but also how they will create a new world. In the end, either everyone will die or the ones who were the most resourceful will live to recreate the world where they live.

Form:

Laura states in her blog that one of the forms found in Station Eleven is syllogistic progressive form, but another form that I see is the repetitive form, which is described as the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises. Also, Kenneth Burke explains in “Lexicon Rhetoricae,” an excerpt from his book Counter Statement (1931) that “A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence” (124). This is shown in the repetitive form because there is the anticipation that whatever is being repeated will show up again at another point in the story.

What is repeated multiple times throughout this novel is the comic book that one of Arthur Leander’s wives, Miranda, worked so hard to draw and create. Throughout the story, there are times when she is working on it for hours at her job. St. John Mandel writes that while Miranda is on the phone talking to her ex-boyfriend about what her job entails, “she winds the phone cord around her finger and looks at the scene she was just working on. Dr. Eleven is confronted by his Undersea nemesis on a subterranean walkway by Station Eleven’s main reactor” (84). This shows that Miranda works on this comic even while she’s at work because she is dedicated to this project.

Another time this comic is repeated in the story is twenty years later when Kirsten and her friend, August, are breaking into abandoned houses and buildings; she looks for celebrity-gossip magazines in hopes of finding information on Arthur Leander. When August questions why she is looking for information about him, she exclaims, ‘“I knew him,’ she’d told August, breathless. ‘He gave me the comics I showed you!’ And August had nodded and asked to see the comics again” (Mandel 40). Arthur had passed down these comics that Miranda gave him to Kirsten and his son Tyler, who is from his second marriage with his wife, Elizabeth.

I don’t find out that Arthur Leander gives Kirsten the comics until I find out that Miranda gave them to Arthur many years after their divorce. Miranda says:

‘You’ve actually just reminded me. I brought you something.’ She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her hand bag, and passed them across the table (Mandel 213).

This is when I find out when Arthur receives the comics and when he then gives them to Kirsten when she was around eight years old.

When the perspective follows Clark, who is an old friend of Arthur, I find out that Tyler, Arthur’s son, also received the comics that Miranda had given Arthur. It’s after the collapse and of the flu pandemic; Clark, along with Elizabeth and Tyler, are stuck in the airport due to the airplanes not being able to take off or land. While stuck in the airport, “Tyler spent his days curled up in an armchair in the Skymiles Lounge, reading his comic books over and over again” (245).

Twenty years later, Tyler is shown again, but under the name of the Prophet. After some events that take place where the Prophet ends up being shot, August finds a New Testament that was held together with tape. And what falls out of it is a folded page of the comic. Mandel writes:

The prophet was about her age. Whatever else the prophet had become, he’d once been a boy adrift on the road, and perhaps he’d had the misfortune of remembering everything. Kirsten brushed her hand over the prophet’s face to close his eyes, and placed the folded page from Station Eleven in his hand (304).

The last time that I saw the comics mentioned in the book was right at the ending when Kirsten gives her copies of the comics to Clark, who started the Museum of Civilization at the airport where he was stuck at for the past twenty or so years. The items displayed in this museum are from before the collapse. Clark “finishes dusting his beloved objects in the Museum of Civilization and settles into his favorite armchair to read through the adventures of Dr. Eleven by candlelight” (331).

The significance of the comic books throughout the story is the fact that everything ends up being history at one point. The comic ended up in a museum with other obsolete items from before the collapse, just like many other items do even in our own society today. It doesn’t mean that it is forgotten, but on the contrary, it is remembered as part of history. Also, the repetition of the comic book shows how history affects the characters in the story, especially Tyler (also known as the Prophet) and Kirsten. It also brings up the question of why are these comics being preserved? How can they last so long, especially after the collapse of a society? The people who want to preserve these artifacts are resourceful people. These comics can also represent the fragileness of human civilization; they can represent, in the novel when I am reading from the perspective of twenty years after the collapse, how the characters are trying to preserve what is left of their civilization and trying to rebuild it.

Intertextual Codes:

The intertextual code that is shown in Station Eleven would be the cultural code. To start off with, Kaja Silverman mentions in Subject of Semiotics, chapter 6, “Re-Writing the Classic Text,” that the cultural code “speak[s] the familiar ‘truths’ of the existing cultural order, repeat what has ‘always been already read, seen, done, experienced’” (242). The existing cultural order that is shown in this book is how it’s human nature to strive to live. This code is something that can be seen in not only this book, but many other books, such as The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins or the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling.

There is a case in the novel when, in the beginning of the story, Jeevan’s friend, Hua, tells him that he has to “get out of the city” when Hua finds out how severe the Georgia Flu actually is (19). In the case of Jeevan, a training paramedic, fear and panic overwhelmed him to the point where his survival instincts told him to stock up on every supply in the local grocery store. There is a natural instinct to want to flee from something dangerous like this flu epidemic that is spreading across the world; the natural instinct to want to stay alive when one’s life is in danger, like Jeevan did when he stocked up on food and supplies.

Another time where the characters strive to live in this story is when the Traveling Symphony are in a civilization where, the first time when they were there, Kirsten was “followed around by a flock of children, but now she only say two, the boy with the toy car and a girl of eleven or so who watched her from a doorway” (49). This makeshift town was almost completely deserted the second time they came through and this kept the group hyperaware. They end up fleeing from this civilization where, as Kirsten called it, “one of those places where you don’t notice everyone’s dropping dead around you till you’ve already drunk the poisoned wine” (Mandel 63). In the case of the cultural code, the group’s survival instincts kicked in when they felt like something was off in the town. They knew not to stick around because they didn’t know who would end up dying next.

This code is also present when there are nightly watches in order to try to protect the others in the Traveling Symphony, and one night “it was as though Dieter and Sayid had been plucked from the face of the earth” (Mandel 136). This happened when Kirsten and August were on watch and Dieter and Sayid went to scout out the road behind them. Kirsten and August had thought they heard a noise in the forest and before they knew it, Dieter and Sayid were gone. The group tried to search for them, but they couldn’t risk their own lives by trying to save those two. The Traveling Symphony isn’t sure what happened to Dieter and Sayid, but if they were killed, the group didn’t want to risk getting themselves killed also.

Rhetorical Relationships:

Laura writes in her last post for this book, “As I stated earlier, I found myself submitting to the text, playing the role the narrator intended for the reader. I was going through the emotions with the characters and trying to solve the mystery of how each character was linked together.” I did the same thing while I was reading this book. I was able to submit to the role that the narrator had intended for me, though I did find it a little difficult with the perspectives always shifting with each chapter or section of the book. The only struggle I had when submitting would be when it came to understanding the fact that the author and the narrator aren’t the same person speaking to the actual audience, or who I was trying to become while reading the book.

Overall, I found it easy, for the most part, to be the role the narrator wanted me to become. Rabinowitz asks in his article, “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” “what sort of person would I have to pretend to be—what would I have to know and believe—if I wanted to take this work of fiction as real?” (128). When it comes this book, I believe that the narrator wants me to become a reader who can get into the mindset of trying to live through an epidemic this severe can happen and trying to survive in a place where the society as I know it is destroyed. I want to say that I didn’t find it hard to cross the bridge between the values the author had for her characters and my own values.

The way that the author wrote the novel helped me get into this mindset. For instance, something that I mentioned in my blog post where I talk about rhetorical relationships is the fact that the events that happen in the story aren’t linear. Not only are there multiple perspectives throughout the story, but also there is a constant shift in the timeline.

When I was in the point of view of the character, Kirsten, it is around twenty years in the future after the Georgia Flu hit and wiped out a majority of the population. She’s twenty-three and in a group called the Traveling Symphony that walks from each population to perform Shakespeare. It also goes back fifteen or so years before the pandemic struck, to show how life was like at that time, in the perspective of Arthur Leander, his first wife Miranda, or his college friend, Clark Thompson. Not only that, but Mandel interweaves each of the characters’ stories together in ways that I wouldn’t have expected, which always kept me engaged in the story.

I was hooked into the story, which would make me a submissive reader to the text or being able to create the role that the text intends the reader to become. I don’t know if it was the premise of the story or this writing technique that made me become this type of reader, but the little hints that Mandel includes that shows links between the characters and how each of their lives were intertwined with each other definitely kept me reading.