Station Eleven by Emily ST. John Mandel is a science fiction book about an epidemic hitting the world causing the human race to be wiped almost to extinction. In the start of the novel it is shown that Arthur Leander dies and Jeevan a former paparazzo who became a EMT tries to save Arthur but doesn’t succeed. Jeevan then helps this little girl named Kristen and tells her that Arthur is dead. Later that day Jeevan got a call from his old roommates Hua who alerted Jeevan of the Georgia flu. Moving about twenty years down the road. The epidemic hit and caused civilization to almost go extinct. In this time zone Kristen is an actor apart of the travelling symphony. After that it starts to go back and forth in time to show the present or the past …show more content…
and how things were different and how in the past. Going from Jeevan and his brother to Kristen and August as they go from town to town with the symphony. With Kristen finding Dr. Eleven comics. It shows Arthur in the fame and how he had no privacy but now that there is an epidemic that hit the world making technology not relevant he is dead. Then we get shown that at the airport terminal Clark, Elizabeth, Tyler and many others settle there. Where they started preserving items from before the flu in case it could be restored and made easier for people to figure out how we started to make these things in the first place. Tyler becomes the prophet and goes on to come in contact with Kristen. The prophet dies by the hands of the young boy who kills himself after. Eventually they make it to the airport and meet Clark who is still taking care of the museum and then Kristen leaves to find new cities and places out in the world. Overall it shows the way people were before the epidemic and how they were after. Showing that the things that didn’t mean much to us and were not fascinating were gone and left as memories only a few will remember. Disaster is something that was used to help show a post-apocalyptic world in the book Station Eleven by Emily ST.
John Mandel. She uses Disaster as a way to show the change of the world and the change in how we look at technology and what we take for granted. Disasters can represent everything we fear and sometimes they can be secretly our desire. It could be the depopulating of the world that allows for the escape from an industrial society (encyclopedia) Throughout the story you see that technology that we once had in our lives starts to get put into museums to help preserve whatever remains hoping that one day we can restore the world back to its technological level it was at back before the Georgia flu showing that before people took what they had for granted the fact that they had the world on their fingertips did not blow their mind but the moment it’s all gone everyone cherishes it even more. In the start of the second part of the book it starts with “twenty years after the end of air travel” she could’ve started with anything like “Twenty years after the end of the world” but by using “after the end of air travel” it shows that at one point in the world they were able to fly in the sky and travel like that instead of needing the usage of horses and broken down cars as wagons. After a pandemic like that only a few remaining pieces of society and technology remain running but in the cause of Station Eleven there is no technology all airports are shut down, cars don’t work, there are no more cellphones, and the power for everything is gone leaving everyone in a time before
electricity. A flu changed the faith of the world from being the society that took centuries perfecting the craft of air travel to not touching the planes in the fear of the flu. Shows that a pandemic like this can cause a lot to be lost the fact that a object weighing a couple of thousand pounds could take off the ground and go across the world showed us what we had and when we lost is it really mattered. In the beginning of the third section it takes about Arthur and Miranda always flying from Los Angeles to Toronto without a doubt of surprise showing that travelling by air was normal to people. The Wright brothers took six years to get there first flying plane. Which was in the air for 39 minutes. While right before the Georgia Flu we could fit probably a couple of hundred people in a plane for a lot longer than 39 minutes but with a disaster like the flu it took all of that away making people understand how it was like to walk places, and go on wagons, and to understand the amount of time it takes. Airplanes represented hope they showed the power of the human race but once they were all left there not active it symbolizes the loss of hope and maybe the one-way people felt safe. By taking the technology that they found and putting it into a museum it allows for the future generations that wanted to rebuild have a head start and know whatever they needed to do. I do believe that Mandel talks about technology being a big part of the human race, and life without it can be something we desire but the true feeling of losing something like that is devastating to loss something like air travel, and cellphone communication, and TV. People start to preserve these things that they once took as a gift. When something is there the presence of that object or resource is not valued but the moment it is taken away it has a greater value to it.
Eden Robinson’s short story “Terminal Avenue” presents readers with the dystopian near-future of Canada where Indigenous people are subjugated and placed under heavy surveillance. The story’s narrator, Wil, is a young Aboriginal man who struggles with his own inner-turmoil after the suicide of his father and his brother’s subsequent decision to join the ranks of the Peace Officers responsible for “adjusting” the First Nations people. Though “Terminal Avenue” takes place in Vancouver there are clear parallels drawn between the Peace Officers of Robinson’s imagination and the Canadian military sent to enforce the peace during the stand-off at Oka, Quebec in 1990. In writing “Terminal Avenue” Robinson addresses the armed conflict and proposes
The climax of the story is when Miles is shot by the Bonewoman. The reader comes to realize that Miles’ choice to live life on the safe side was a mistake:
Sonya Hartnett’s ‘The Midnight Zoo’ a touching story that explores the effect war had on animals, children and nature. Both human and animal characters speak about their experiences throughout this period. The book tells about how a hunger for power over something that is not owned impacts everybody and leaves innocents caught up in a large mess.
“and so when you left, you just kept walking with no destination in mind”(pg.198), after the flu Kirsten lived in Toronto with her brother but kirsten and her brother left Toronto with no real destination in mind and ended up in Ohio, and after her brother died of an infection she lived alone there before joining the traveling symphony.Mandel shows us how “normal” the new world is to kirsten, when kirsten,august, and an older member of the traveling symphony went into an abandoned school to scavenger hunt the older member of the symphony was disgusted by what she saw and she asked august and kirsten how they even could do this and kirsten told her the reason she could do this is because she is younger than her and she remembers little of the old world. I think mandel is trying to say that the younger you were when the epidemic happened the faster you are able to resilience because you don’t remember much of the world being different in the first place, “We went to a place where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different”(pg.115), and I think that is helping them to resilience faster than the adults that have hard time believing that their world is gone,“maybe it’s time we let go”(pg.270), even if they have managed to adapt to the new world and started over a new civilization they still refuse to believe the old world is truly
Through his uses of descriptive language Hersey exposes to the reader the physical, emotional, Psychological and structural damage caused by a nuclear attack. He shows the reader how peoples are physically changed but also how emotional psychologically scared by this act of horror. Through Hersey’s graphic detail of the horror after the bomb and the effects years after he shock the reader while also give the message that we shouldn’t let this happen again. In the book Hiroshima the author John Hersey exposes that a nuclear attack is not simply a disaster that fades away when the rubble is removed and buildings are rebuilt but an act of horror that changes the course of people’s live.
To begin, it is evident today that teenagers love being connected with their friends and family all at the tip of their thumbs. They love texting. According to a study by Amanda Lenhart, 88 percent of teens use a cell phone or smart phone of which 90 percent of them use text message. An average teen sends 30 texts per day. (Lenhart) As shown in this study, teens have easy access to text messaging. In her Ted talks called “Texting That Save Lives” and “The Heartbreaking Text That Inspired a Crisis Help Line,” Nancy Lublin talks about how she received disturbing text messages from young people that mentions how they’re being bullied, wanting to commit suicide, cutting themselves, and being raped by their father. She was exceedingly emotional when receiving these texts. She felt like she had to do something about it. So, with her knowledge about teens and the power of texting, Nancy Lublin created something that would help save these young kids’ lives, the Crisis Text Line. (“Texting”)(“Heartbreaking”)
In “The Son of Man,” Natalia Ginzburg asserts that while the war did irreparable psychological damage to its survivors, it also gave the young generation enough strength to confront the stark reality of the precarious nature of human existence. Passionately but concisely, through the use of repetitive imagery, fatalistic tone and lack of classic organization, Ginzburg shows how the war changed the world around Man and how Man changed his perception of the world.
Sanity is subjective. Every individual is insane to another; however it is the people who possess the greatest self-restraint that prosper in acting “normal”. This is achieved by thrusting the title of insanity onto others who may be unlike oneself, although in reality, are simply non-conforming, as opposed to insane. In Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, this fine line between sanity and insanity is explored to great lengths. Through the unveiling of Susanna’s past, the reasoning behind her commitment to McLean Hospital for the mentally ill, and varying definitions of the diagnosis that Susanna received, it is evident that social non-conformity is often confused with insanity.
Apocalyptic literature gives people some type of hope in a time of crises. A crises could be defined as a time when people think the world is ending, a war going on, maybe even a natural disaster like a flood that wipes out everything. The 17th century was a time where apocalyptic literature helped people feel more at ease when a crisis was occurring. Many people in that time period were on the line of poor and with no power, which made it even more important to have some type of hope.
In “A Rose for Emily”, Charles Faulkner used a series of flashbacks and foreshadowing to tell Miss Emily’s story. Miss Emily is an interesting character, to say the least. In such a short story of her life, as told from the prospective of a townsperson, who had been nearly eighty as Miss Emily had been, in order to tell the story from their own perspective. Faulkner set up the story in Mississippi, in a world he knew of in his own lifetime. Inspired by a southern outlook that had been touched by the Civil War memory, the touch of what we would now look at as racism, gives the southern aroma of the period. It sets up Miss Emily’s southern belle status and social standing she had been born into, loner or not.
Emily St. John Mandel’s book, “Station Eleven” and “The Giver” is a dystopian novel. These two books are widely creative and fictional. “Station Eleven” shows of how an epidemic can change society and “The Giver” shows the controlling and the government of how it can affect society. In the beginning of, “Station Eleven,” there is a leading actor, Arthur Leander, who is dying from a heart attack. This is just beginning of the epidemic, known as the Georgian Flu. It wipes out the whole civilization. The book then skips forward to the present to a woman, Kirsten, who was eight when she was on stage with Arthur Leander and is now trying to make her way in a world that 's been dealt with the epidemic. Kirsten doesn’t remember much of from this
All throughout London’s essay, one sees that he focus’ on the destruction of the city in the 1906 earthquake. He defines the city as, “wiped out” and “all gone” which gives his essay a fearful and defeated tone at the beginning. London goes on to define the city as it is alive, “half the heart of the city was gone”. In paragraph five he again explains the city to be alive, “Wednesday night saw the destruction of
In Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder teaches philosophy and it explains basic philosophical ideas better than any other reading book or textbook that I have ever read. The many philosophical lessons of the diversified thinkers of their own time were dexterously understood. The author has a wonderful knack for finding the heart of a concept and placing it on display. For example, he metamorphoses Democritus' atoms into Lego bricks and in a stroke makes the classical conception of the atom dexterously attainable. He relates all the abstract concepts about the world and what is real with straightforward everyday things that everyone can relate to which makes this whole philosophy course manageable. ''The best way of approaching philosophy is to ask a few philosophical questions: How was the world created? Is there any will or meaning behind what happens? Is there a life after death? How can we answer these questions? And most important, how ought we to live?'' (Gaarder, Jostein 15).
In the novel Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi El Saadawi reveals a narrative about a woman named Firdaus who is sentenced to death after murdering a pimp in a Cairo street. Nawal, who is both the author and a narrator of the book, is a physiatrist that almost instantly forms a certain interests for Firdaus. As Firdaus’ stubbornness attracts Nawal to her physiatrist journey, El Saadawi notes Firdaus’ desire to be executed and accept death even though she was given the opportunity to spend a life in prison rather than be executed, As the novel progresses, Firdaus reveals her anger and bitter life to El Saadawi that revolves around the setting Firdaus has been from childhood to adulthood. With this, El Saadawi creates sympathy and admiration towards Firdaus because of Firdaus’ environment. As a result of this empathy, the setting is essential to Firdaus’ characterization as her surroundings prove her to be a brave and independent woman during the mid-1970s.
Cohn, Norman, James Tabor, and L. M. White. "Apocalypticism Explained." Apocalypse! FRONTLINE | PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 1999. Web.