33 pages • 1-hour read
Zone One
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Themes
The Collapse of Modernity
The main setting of the novel is New York City, renamed Zone One in the aftermath of the virus. New York City is not only a site of personal significance for Mark, the novel’s protagonist, but also a symbol of modernity and progress. At the novel’s beginning, Mark has a flashback to being in his Uncle Lloyd’s New York City apartment, which represents to him a promise of financial success, as it overlooks the city skyline. While there, young Mark had marveled at the tremendous history of the city emblematized by the vast skyline. Mark had noted that “The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of the rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants” (6). Mark understood from an early age how the city insisted on destructive acts to make room for new buildings and people. To him, this is a crucial facet of modernity symbolized by the once-great New York City.
The political and economic significance of New York City is why the U.S. government is so insistent on reconstructing it in the aftermath of the virus. Ms. Macy, the public-relations official from Buffalo, states that the rebuilding of New York City would ensure hope for the future of reconstruction: “The symbolism alone. If we can do that, we can do anything” (168). However, Mark begins to realize that the insistence on modernity is an impossible project for the post-apocalyptic world. Towards the end of the novel, he notices that the skels are amassing through the streets of New York City in an act that will ensure the final destruction of modernity. He notes that “Every race, color, and creed was represented in this congregation that funneled down the avenue” (243). The sight ironically points to the rush of new immigrant communities that make up New York City’s diverse population. In the skel takeover of New York City, Mark realizes that this diversity remains unchanged in the crowd of marching skels. However, the end goal this time is not human progress but the end of humanity altogether.
The Monstrosity of Humanity
The virus creates a division between the infected parties and surviving humans. The infected parties are considered monstrous for their transformation into flesh-desiring beings and their propensity towards violence. While the horrific nature of the infected parties generate fear in the surviving humans, the post-apocalyptic landscape has forced many surviving humans to perform horrific actions in the name of survival as well. For instance, Mark notes an especially gruesome memory of when he stayed at a hotel with other survivors in those first months after the Last Night. During that time, he encountered families on the run together in seemingly good spirits. One day, that hotel was overtaken by human bandits who raped, tortured, and killed the residents of the hotel for no reason other than pleasure in cruelty. While the immediate danger of the skels preside over the landscape, other humans prove to be equally as dangerous. Although the skels are the literal monsters of the novel, human cruelty figures as a different type of monster.
As with the other sweepers, Mark’s duty to kill skels creates a problem of conscience. While there are hostile skels, there are also seemingly harmless stragglers. Some stragglers appear to still be human in the way that they are stuck performing the same monotonous activity after their infection. Their human affectations distinguish them from the skels. Mark notes that “while skels get referred to as it, the stragglers were awarded male and female pronouns” (82). The stragglers’ proximity to humanity, in comparison to the surviving humans’ cruelty, demonstrates that the spectrum between human and monster is narrower than previously defined.
The Narration of Traumatic Memory
Like many of the human survivors of the virus, Mark experiences PASD (Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder), a condition that causes survivors to recall and suffer through traumatic memories of their most horrific moments after the Last Night through nightmares, hallucinations, flashbacks, and other physical symptoms. This condition informs the structure and narration of Zone One, a novel that narrates Mark’s experiences in real time over the course of three days leading up to the fall of Fort Wonton while also flashing back to Mark’s past. By moving back and forth between past and present, the novel introduces information about Mark’s history as well as his more recent past, to provide context for the ways in which the world around him had struggled to survive in the aftermath of the Last Night. This structure also mimics the physical symptoms of Mark’s PASD, which include frequent flashbacks and low-level hallucinations.
Because of this constant toggling between present and past traumas, Mark is secretive about his past. He goes between different versions of the story of his Last Night depending on circumstance. He would share the Silhouette version with “survivors he wasn’t going to travel with for long” (137) as it would protect him from oversharing his traumatic Last Night and risk intimacy with those he hardly knew. A slightly more fleshed-out version was the Anecdote, which “was acceptable to strangers to allow them to fall asleep without thinking he’d bludgeon them in their sleeping bags” (137-8). The Obituary was reserved for those he had been around for a while and who might be “the final human being they’d see” before they both died. Mark finds himself alone at the end of the novel without an opportunity to narrate this last and most intimate version of his story. This obstructed potential for intimacy paints a grim portrait of a specific trauma produced by the virus.
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