Station Eleven Themes

Survival

The novel starts with an individual death and quickly expands to a global pandemic that wipes out 99 percent of the population. But the question of survival is more than physical.

Mandel uses the novel to ask questions about what makes it worthwhile to survive and what people are willing to do to keep going. Tyler, who grows up to become the Prophet, believes the pandemic was a cleansing and only the worthy lived, but then kills and terrorizes in his quest for more power. Kirsten and others also have to kill in self-defense. Late in the novel, when August has to kill someone, Kirsten realizes that it was his first, and that he had “the colossal good fortune to have made it to Year Twenty without killing anyone.”

The issue of survival also encompasses objects and memories. Kirsten ponders whether it is better to remember the time before or to have no idea of how much has been lost. Although she has almost no memory of the time before the pandemic, she refuses to let go of her two artifacts of that time: the Dr. Eleven comics and the beautiful glass paperweight. She seeks out information about Arthur, whom she barely knew in life, because it anchors her to a moment in the time before. And the Dr. Eleven comics, which Miranda intended to keep private, end up surviving and traveling much of the post-collapse world. At the end of the novel, Kirsten sets out to find the electric lights, a promising prospect. However, she leaves a copy of Dr. Eleven behind with Clark, acknowledging both the dangers she still faces on the road and the importance of the comic continuing to survive.

Throughout the novel, Mandel returns again and again to the way that art survives long past the artist. Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague. The play endured for 400 years in order to be performed in Toronto in the opening scene, and endured beyond that to be rehearsed and remembered by the members of the Symphony in Year Twenty. It is almost meta-fictive that in a post-apocalyptic novel, books and plays survive when most of the world’s population has died.

Art

Both Shakespeare and the Dr. Eleven comics play an important role in the theme of art throughout the novel. Miranda, the creator of Dr. Eleven, has no aspirations for fame and no desire to share her art. This is ironic, since it is her work, along with Shakespeare’s, that is so important in the post-collapse world. When so much else has vanished completely, her comics, of which there were only 10 copies of each made, are known and shared. Her opinion of art as a private matter stands in contrast to Arthur, who seeks fame and attention and, even when in private with his friends, feels that he must perform his role.

The quality of the art, and who gets to decide that quality, is part of this thematic discussion. Kirsten loves the quote “Survival is insufficient” and considers it her favorite line of text in the world. Dieter, in contrast, thinks that it would be more profound if it had come from somewhere other than a television show. Comic books and television shows are considered “low” or popular art, in contrast to classical music or Shakespeare. Ironically, Shakespeare’s plays were enjoyed as popular lower class entertainment in his day.

The paperweight, an item of great beauty, illustrates another way that themes of art flow through the novel. It is utterly impractical and does not serve any use on the road, yet Kirsten keeps it among her limited possessions, underscoring that she requires more than just survival. While her knives are necessary for her survival, art and beauty—Shakespeare and Dr. Eleven and the paperweight—are what keep her human. The paperweight is a literal weight she has to carry; it symbolizes her past, but it also keeps her moving forward.

Civilization

The symbols of civilization in the novel are myriad: airplanes, global shipping, phones, electricity, and, of course, art. At different moments in the plot, different characters ruminate on what this breakdown of civilization means and on what civilization has remained.

As they watch the collapse, Jeevan and his brother consider how useless the modern world becomes without humans to make all the technology run: to staff power grids and drive long-haul trucks and stock shelves. Humans created civilization, and yet, as is shown again and again, they expect civilization to somehow exist beyond them. As the pandemic spreads, most of the characters begin by assuming that the structure of civilization will hold, that the National Guard and the Red Cross will show up and fix things. But as the novel makes clear, civilization is more fragile than most people believe. Slowly, the characters must give up their previously held assumptions. Some, like Elizabeth and Tyler, fill the void with religion, while others, like Clark, seek to maintain certain artifacts and values from before.

But even as modern civilization disappears, leaving the few remaining people without medicine, transportation, electricity, and more, the humans who remain begin the process of starting over. The Symphony, like any community, has in-fighting and jealousies and petty arguments, struggling through the mundane frustrations of everyday life. By Year Twenty, post-collapse violence has abated, and towns and communities have started to rebuild. And at the end of the novel, Kirsten and the Symphony are heading into uncharted territory, seeking the electric lights seen in the distance, suggesting that a return to civilization has begun.