Station Eleven Summary and Analysis

Section Seven Summary The Terminal

This section is largely from Clark’s point of view and covers the 19 years after the pandemic first hits. When Clark’s plane lands in Severn City Airport, he is one of hundreds of stranded passengers. The survivors cycle through myriad stages of acceptance, from waiting for the National Guard to ultimately sending out hunting expeditions and creating work schedules to keep everything running. Clark clings to his sanity, first through imaginary conversations with his boyfriend, then through rituals of shaving and maintenance. Elizabeth seems less able to hold on to reality; she believes civilization will return, despite all evidence to the contrary, and continues to say that everything happens for a reason. Tyler echoes her belief, reading Bible passages to the dead passengers on a quarantined jet, saying those who were saved deserved it. Tyler and Elizabeth leave in Year Two with a traveling cult.

On Day 100, Clark places a few remnants of pre-pandemic life in an airport display case and begins the Museum of Civilization. Others add things—high heels, smartphones, snow globes—and he ruminates on the many people and machines it took to create and ship everything. Over the years he continues to curate and host the museum, explaining the items to the travelers who pass through.

In Year Fifteen, a trader brings copies of the homemade newspapers with Kirsten’s interview, a find that excites Clark, first because it suggests a return to some normalcy and second because Kirsten references Arthur’s death. Clark is amazed that someone might be alive who knew Arthur and that elements of the pre-collapse world are regenerating.

The section then shifts to Kirsten’s interview in Year Fifteen, where she talks off the record about her knife tattoos. Kirsten says she wants this off the record because her search for anything about Arthur makes her aware of how permanent information can be.

In Year Fifteen, Jeevan is living in a peaceful settlement in what had been Virginia, married and with a child. He is the community’s only doctor, fulfilling his desire, years ago, to help people. A man arrives in town with a woman who’s been shot. It is the man’s wife, and as Jeevan tends to her, the man tells him about the Prophet, his terrorizing around the south, and his kidnapping tactics.

Section Seven Analysis The Terminal

Many of the story threads start to converge here, providing several missing pieces: that Elizabeth and Arthur’s son Tyler grew up to become the Prophet, the context around Kirsten’s interview with the Librarian, how the Museum of Civilization began, and what the fate was of several of the earlier characters.

That those at the airport survived while almost everyone they knew died begs the question: Is survival just a matter of fate or luck? Survival also comes up in a different context when Kirsten and the Librarian discuss Kirsten killing in self-defense; the question of what information survives, even when you are gone, is one that drives Kirsten to keep some information off the record. This section also deals with the issue of not only who survives, but how. Clark clings to elements of his humanity, and the airport overall seeks to create an environment beyond mere survival, from the punishment of a rapist to the sharing of languages to the creation of the Museum.

The Museum of Civilization, and the airport overall, become the closest thing to civilization the reader sees since the collapse. The airport survivors form a school and a sense of home and safety that is largely lacking elsewhere. But all that is lost is still evident, as Clark ponders all the thousands of people who worked to create something as mundane as a snow globe, and how beautiful it is, given that nothing like it can be created again.