Identity and Memory in 'The Walking Dead'

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ur identity is built upon our own memories and with those memories we can construct ourselves. Throughout the Walking Dead, we see that zombies are portrayed as nothing more than hollowed and grotesque version of people that had existed from a different time. They may retain some familiar human appearance such as having hair and clothing, but the part that made them mentally human died when the virus inserted the body. Their memories are gone, their sense of self has faded, and all that remains is the everlasting need to feast on anything that moves.
In the show we not only see how the zombie functions within the universe of the Walking Dead, we watch Rick come into contact with many zombies and has developed a sense of what they are and were, from the very beginning. From the beginning of the pilot we see him show compassion and remorse to the “Bicycle girl”, before putting her down. Even in the second episode, Guts, there is a moment after Rick kills one of the zombies, he takes out his wallet and starts honoring what this person was, before he was transformed. What the show enforces, is a sense that these Zombies were once everyday people that you would talk to, work with, or just walk by in passing. Now they are reducing …show more content…

Thus creating the Zombie. In the Walking Dead show, we are, take through step by step of watching people that we have seen transformed. Take for example in Season 1, Amy, Andrea’s sister, gets bitten and dies in Andrea’s hand, only to be brought back as a reanimated version of herself and put to rest by Andrea herself. We painfully watch the transition happen before our very eyes, working fast and killing the Amy that we have watch, and recreating a malformed version in her place. The Amy that we knew died when she was bitten and the Amy that was brought back to life was a new being looking for

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