Earth Abides

“There was no particular reason, he realized, why he should sit in his own car rather than some other.”

With the human race nearly extinct, old laws and traditions fall by the wayside (although Ish feels the need to respect them anyway). He confronts, not for the first time, the requirements of long-established and ingrained rituals—laws, property rights, safety measures—and their utter meaninglessness in these circumstances. Earth Abides poses a philosophical question: Are traditions an important element of social cohesion or merely arbitrary rules to be tossed aside when no longer needed?

“After he had paused just a moment at the red lights, he drove on through them, even though feeling a slight sense of wrongdoing as he did so.”

Driving through a deserted town, Ish runs several red lights. Despite being in no danger of a collision, he still hesitates to violate traffic laws. The sense of law and order, of holding chaos at bay by respecting laws that have no practical meaning anymore, is so internalized that his conscience nags at him just as if the streets were choked with traffic.

“No, the Great Disaster had shown no predilection toward sparing the nice people, and the survivors had not been rendered pleasanter as the result of the ordeal through which they had passed.”

As Ish combs the streets for other survivors, he finds a corpse that he assumes is dead from alcohol poisoning, and a young woman who Ish describes as “crazy.” He fears that he won’t find any “nice people,” and he ponders the question of a random universe: To him, it seems there is no rhyme or reason to who has survived and who hasn’t, as the plague has not “spared” the people whom Ish views as worthy of being spared. For a man who believes himself so eminently rational, Ish demonstrates a propensity for highly irrational cosmic narratives in which mental health is equivalent to virtue and that virtue is rewarded with good fortune. Such a philosophy is no more rational or scientific than the superstitions he condemns.

“Yes, he realized if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity.”

As one of the few survivors, it would be easy, Ish realizes, to imagine himself as chosen by God; but that line of thinking is ill-fated because it ignores the randomness of biology. Ish’s god complex is a recurring obstacle—when he conducts classes for the Tribe’s children, he sees himself as the great conveyer of knowledge, as almost a god, his hammer a totem of great power. Fortunately, he is able to quell this delusion and see it for what it is: a runaway ego based on his belief in his greater intellect.

“This is the desert, the great wilderness—slow to give, and slow to take away.”

As Ish journeys east, he camps in the desert. The rocky wasteland stretches endlessly before him, and he is reminded of the tremendous power and scale of nature. In a brief digression, the narrator describes the timelessness of the desert, how it will outlast even the most enduring legacies of humanity. The ageless landscape, whose changes can be measured only in centuries or millennia, echoes a powerful theme in the novel: the impermanence of humanity compared to the constancy of nature.

“‘Here,’ he reflected, ‘I might be a king in a little way, if I remained.’”

Driving through Arkansas, Ish encounters a small group of Black farmers from whom he buys some eggs. They are deferential in his presence, and Ish speculates that, as a white man, he could potentially rule over the small plot of land and subjugate them into servitude. The thought passes, but its very existence suggests the contemporary ethos views a white supremacist racial hierarchy as somehow normative. Ish, a scholar and intellectual, is not immune to the lure of power, even power based on racial oppression.

“But certainly what had happened did not inspire one to think that God was particularly interested in the human race, or in its individuals.”

Although the characters often wonder if God has forsaken them and if their difficulties are really divine retribution, the novel takes a decidedly more secular approach. Grounded in science, it views the plague as any other natural occurrence, like an earthquake or tsunami. It situates humanity squarely within those parameters, subject to the whims of nature just like any other species. Ish, the self-understood rationalist, wants to see the hand of God in this devastation, but to no avail. His concept of divinity (and divine justice) may be narrow, but his refusal to attribute the Great Disaster to a divine cause helps prevent feelings of pessimism.

“Destroy the culture-pattern in which people lived, and often the shock was too great for the individuals.”

As Ish encounters other survivors on the road, he observes in them “a kind of emotional death” (77), the result of being set adrift from all their social and cultural anchors—family, friends, jobs, institutions. The ones that thrive seem to be the ones who find a familiar culture-pattern to embrace: the farmers who raise chickens and till the soil, or the couple in New York who cling to their cocktail hour ritual.

“‘The lights are going out. The lights of the world!’ he thought and he felt like a child going alone into the dark.’”

As the electrical grid fails, Ish despairs. He is suddenly aware of how much humanity has come to depend on artificial light, a relatively recent development compared to the tens of thousands of years during which humans lived by the cycles of the sun and moon. It is one of the starkest examples of humanity’s impermanence and a reminder of how easily a rational, educated person can be rendered helpless and frightened in the absence of familiar technology.

“They were little words, meaning nothing, yet there was a great joy to say them.”

The morning after Ish and Emma meet (and make love), they exchange small talk about breakfast, but Ish takes utter delight in the simple conversation. He hadn’t known how much he missed the casual give-and-take with another person, a sign that he is ready to allow Emma into his life. On his own for so long, Ish is reminded that humans are social creatures, and in order to survive—and thrive—they must come together and cooperate and establish bonds of community.

“The only thing to do was to make an investigation, and thus render the rats less horrible, because when you knew something about the situation, you saw the interest that lay in it.”

When swarms of rats engulf the neighborhood, Ish defaults to his clinical mindset. If he can study the rats as a problem of population density rather than seeing them as terrifying rodents, he and Emma may be able to cope with their instinctive revulsion. In this circumstance, Ish’s training as a biologist comes in handy, and he surmises, correctly, that the rats will eventually run out of food and die off. In the meantime, they just have to keep them out of the house.

“George and Maurine sinking the Methodist-Catholic difference were the ones who suggested church services—“for the sake of the children.”

In an attempt to establish some form of structural traditions, the Tribe toys with the idea of religious services. While “for the sake of the children” may be a convenient rationale, it speaks to the human need for ritual, for the belief that benevolence and order can be found in the universe. The church services don’t last, however. The Tribe’s spiritual diversity—plus the cynicism instilled by massive death and trauma—cut the practice short.

“But in the Old Times, people thought about the future. Look at the way they built up civilization.”

Ish obsessively worries about the future, and he and Emma debate the usefulness of trying to foresee every emergency. Ish thinks big. Not content to repair an aqueduct or keep a car running, he imagines rebuilding all of Western civilization, an impossible task for a group of 36. In the end, he sees the futility of such a prospect, and he must be content to reinvent the bow rather than the Renaissance.

“Such people always wanted to have fine bridge-lamps and electric clocks and radios and all the rest, and now that it was possible to have all these things, they had merely gone out and got them and put them into the house. Their not working was secondary.”

When George and Maurine furnish their home with luxuries they couldn’t afford in the Old Times, Ish is perplexed because they are effectively useless. Then, he realizes that functionality is not the point. The point is ownership and bragging rights. George and Maurine are emblematic of the desire to acquire pointless objects simply for status. As members of the working class (or what used to be the working class), George and Maurine take this as a chance to live the high life and experience some of the prosperity that capitalism promises.

“History was an artist, maintaining the idea but changing the details, like a composer keeping the same theme but dulling it to a minor or lifting by an octave, now crooning it with violins, now blaring it on trumpets.”

Ish, contemplating their place in history, sees not a straight timeline with numbers and facts and names but rather a complex and fluid symphony. Major themes—the rise and fall of civilizations, wars, innovation—repeat, but the details change. The current empire might be named France or Great Britain or Spain or the United States, but each in their turn will follow the others into the annals of history. All people and nations are simply musical notes in the greater symphony of history.

“He was as much as saying to the powers of chance and change: ‘Here, make this one come out different, if you can!’ And when those dark powers could not prevail, it was again a triumph for intellect.”

When Joey experiments with geometrical patterns, he discovers that certain outcomes—arranging triangles to form a straight line—can be replicated every time. He performs the exercise repeatedly, and Ish imagines that Joey is pitting his own understanding of mathematics against the randomness of nature. The fact that Joey forms a straight line every time is confirmation of a greater truth and a bulwark against the “dark forces” of chaos and chance. Ish also sees it as a confirmation that Joey is the sole member of the group with the intellectual potential to accept the torch of leadership.

“Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there.”

Joey tells Ish a riddle, the punchline of which relies on “the idea of negative likeness” (223)—two things being similar based on what they don’t have. Always seeking confirmation of Joey’s brilliance, Ish sees in this simple riddle the seeds of genius. Like Michelangelo, who claimed to see a finished sculpture hiding within an uncut slab of marble, Joey can (Ish believes) see potentialities that others cannot. This visionary ability is the “capacity for seeing what is not there.”

“Sometimes I think there’s something ugly and dirty and mean— clear to the middle of him. Sometimes I think he’ll be my best friend.”

After Charlie joins the group, Ish is relieved when Ezra confirms his suspicions about the stranger. This passage is noteworthy for two reasons: Ezra, always the convivial friend and arbiter, rarely says anything negative about another person, so his suspicion carries extra weight. Second, his use of strong, blunt language—“ugly,” “dirty,” “mean”—is uncharacteristic of Ezra. Together, these rhetorical elements create an air of foreboding that is new to the story.

“But in any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under.”

As Ish and the Tribe decide what to do about Charlie, Ish realizes how ill-equipped he is to deal with someone who won’t be reasoned with. Charlie is openly defiant and implicitly challenges Ish’s order to stay away from Evie. Ish faces an uncomfortable truth: In any battle of brains versus charisma or force, the brains lose every time (ironic, considering Ish’s standard for leadership thus far has been his intellect). His conclusion is that force must be met with force. The Tribe must present a united front and show Charlie his actions have consequences—deadly consequences, it turns out.

“It would have been better, he had often thought, if they had merely put a can of sweet ant-poison within her reach somewhere […] Their caring for her had been, he thought sometimes, merely a curious lingering of an old standard of humanitarianism.”

When Ish considers that Evie is at the center of this crisis with Charlie, he laments her very existence. He resents the Tribe’s duty to protect her from sexual assault, and he coldly wishes they had simply poisoned her and gotten her out of the way. Superficially, Ish’s dehumanizing perspective could be framed as a survivalist mindset born of desperate circumstances—yet his thoughts here obliquely echo his early ideas in Part 1, Chapter 2 (Quote 4), when he believed the plague should not have “spared” people with alcohol addiction or certain other mental health conditions. Ish may be a complex character, but he has harbored covert supremacist attitudes from the outset.

“In the past, there had been only a little group of people scarcely more than an overgrown family. In the future, there would be the State.”

Charlie’s execution leaves Ish feeling “sick, physically.” With this act, the Tribe has crossed a moral line, and Ish catastrophizes the event as he fears that an authoritarian “State” is inevitable. In another of the novel’s Biblical references, the Tribe has eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and been forced out of Eden.

“Now—at least they would hope—there would be no endless succession of blind babies, and of trembling witless old men, and of marriages defiled even in their consummation.”

Desperately trying to rationalize Charlie’s murder, Ish spins a litany of hypothetical consequences if Charlie had assaulted Evie and caused a pregnancy; only by seeing the crisis in such hyperbolic context can he justify an act of mob violence. Notably, rather than focusing on the actual problem they averted—sexual assault and nonconsensual pregnancy—Ish imagines a moral pollution of the entire Tribe and a reduction of all that is virtuous in their little world to corruption and abomination. He ironically is motivated not by empathy for Evie but by a form of antipathy for her.

“Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization.”

Ish brings the hammer to the burial service for the five children, a symbol of strength and stability the others have come to rely on. Before the dual tragedies of Charlie and typhoid, Ish would have argued that the hammer is just a hammer with no mystical power; in the face of these crises, however, he relents and sees the value of the hammer as a symbol, even if it is a superstition. He concedes that drawing strength from an inanimate object can be useful, however irrational. Perhaps, he thinks, this new reality calls for such irrationalism.