The theme I am sticking to is “fate and faith”. I need a clear outline on how to write this essay with citations from the book. I also need a clear thesis statement to help me guide the theme. This is what my professor provided as a study guide.
Station Eleven jumps back and forth across the pandemic’s before and after line from beginning to end, sharing with us the memories of its central characters: Kirsten Raymonde, Clark Thompson, Miranda Carroll, and Arthur Leander. Add to this list Miranda’s comics, and Francois Diallo’s New Petosky News.
Arthur dies on page 2, but he’s a kind of ground zero that connects the book’s central characters. Miranda dies in a brilliant sunrise on a Malaysian beach, her thoughts lost in her comics. Kirsten and Clark make appearances in the pre-pandemic world, but both play important roles after the collapse of civilization. Kirsten guides readers through the present, which is year 20, while Clark – who had spent 20 years tending to The Museum of Civilization – has had the time to examine the road humanity has taken. He’s wise enough to laugh at the occasional absurdity of pre-pandemic life, while treasuring it as well.
At times, the author, Emily St. John Mandel’s book focuses on the words and deeds of the book’s characters, at others, the author speaks straight to us, as she does at the beginning of chapter 11: “What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.” It’s a comment on civilization and how we perceive the world. You’ll also find a brief shout-out to Shakespeare by Kirsten as Tatiana in the Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this chapter, Mandel introduces us to the Traveling Symphony’s motto, “Because survival is insufficient.” Mandel tells us that Shakespeare wrote that play in 1594, when his theater opened after being closed by plague for two years (Mandel would still love Shakespeare even if he wasn’t living during deadly plague years, but pointing it out seems to matter.
Miranda, Memory, and the Sweetness of life on Earth: Dr. Eleven, looking over the world of the broken space ship says: “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.” I don’t think he was truly trying to forget; rather he was haunted by indelible bittersweet memories the way you might remember a lover from your past, or your high school yearbook. Find the places in the book where Miranda talks/thinks about her comic project. She is dead from the Georgia Flu long before the TS forms and performs, but Station Eleven the comic explores the same questions that haunt the survivors of the modern plague. The comic’s aliens are similar to the pandemic that left only a few people struggling to survive. Dr. Eleven’s broken spaceship could be the 320 residents of Severn City Airport, although there’s no rebellion at the airport, save Elizabeth Colton (who believes “everything happens for a reason”) and her son and future Prophet Tyler (who as a child reads New Testament verses to skeletons on a quarantined passenger jet) who share something in common with the homesick residents of the Undersea?
Miranda wasn’t around for the horrors of the post-pandemic world, but Dr. Eleven and the rebellious Undersea understand bittersweet memory. The comic book characters have memories that stab them in their hearts – because all of them made a decision in the past to turn their backs on the past. Dr. Eleven is kind of a realist; he knows the aliens conquered Earth, and that there’s no going back to recapture the past. The Undersea’s desperate desires are probably foolish, yet they’re experiencing “mere survival,” which as Kirsten (and Star Trek) declare is not enough, despite the dangers brought by each new town. Take note of the importance (and the inevitability) of memory to these characters.
You should know where (what chapters) to find the moments in the book where Miranda thinks about the imaginary world she’s drawing into creation.
Kirsten: You could say that Kirsten, who we met in the book’s first chapter, has what it takes. She is a survivor, a creative, a passionate 30-something woman who loves what Shakespeare’s 400-year old work means in her present life. She fights ferociously to live (metaphorically and practically – remember her tattoos), but remembers little of pre-pandemic life. She is an embodiment of what it means to live: a leader, a brilliant actor and a fierce friend, pouring herself into everything. If many people in pre-pandemic life are “sleepwalkers,” as a woman once explained to Clark in a long-ago interiew, catastrophe – the unthinkable destruction of the plague – awakens everyone to their improbable survival. The Traveling Symphony brings memory of the past and possibility of the future with them – reminders that to live is to hope.
The New Petosky News: Francois Diallo’s paper is a small step towards rebuilding civilization. Each issue records events and memories that are inscribed in print, preserving the past for the future. Kirsten, whose obsession with old Entertainment Weeklys and People Magazines, doesn’t want to answer Diallo’s questions about her tattoos because she knows print journalism is a public record of events, available to anyone. She has the tattoos as a personal record of life’s most horrific act, to remind her that forgetting about murder is an evil that’s second only to the act itself. She doesn’t want a stranger to read about what she’s done as if it were just another news item. Later, in chapter tk, after she’s killed tk, we read about her first two. Death was no stranger to survivors of the pre-pandemic world, marked as it was by billions of deaths. But before that there were the mass slaughters of world wars, the two unthinkable nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, countless murders caused by greed and rage. The two dead men are nothing by comparison, but there is no forgiving murder in the new world as in the old. Kirsten refuses to find excuses, and so do her friends Charlie and Jeremy, who have six tattoos among them.
Clark and The Museum of Civilization: Clark officially declared the Museum of Civilization on day 100, although is began by chance on day 2 when a man named tk left a credit card on the counter of the Airports one restaurant to cover the last meal it served to diners, some of whom were uncomfortable about not paying for their food. Clark, who was an original, day-one resident, could be described as a post-pandemic philosopher. Interestingly, he wore his hair shaved off on one side of his head, a style he wore when he was 19 (he said it was the first time he felt like himself since then – a telling observation).
Mandel offers line in chapter 43, pages 254-255 that captures one aspect of his interests. “He found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object required.” He goes on to offer a kind of poem giving thanks to the everyday miracles of life on Earth. The paragraph ends as he looks through the snow globe at the massive, useless planes on the runway, warped and swirling snow as if they were memories themselves. The Museum displayed digital devices, newspapers and magazines, useless personal items like Elizabeth Colton’s red spike heels, credit cards and passports and drivers licenses, memorabilia, small knick knacks, and a beautiful Harley Davidson. The collection no doubt triggered memories, occasional laughter, and discussion. Clark treated visitors with respect, and did his best to offer explanations and context. While sitting in usual chair, he was often lost in his own memories, but even those showed his affection for humanity.
Hope: It’s ironic that despite the almost unbelievable challenges that humanity – everyday people, as individuals and as groups – sometimes face, we will fight death to our last breath. We driven by hope, always by hope – that things will get better (even if it’s just surviving for another day).
When many of the Station Eleven’s threads come together in the final chapters, it’s this that shines through: to live is to hope – it is simply hardwired into humanity. There is hope with a capital H, like the scientific and practical breakthroughs promised by the well-lit main street that Clark shows Kirsten from the Airport’s tall observation tower. There’s Hope in Clark’s day dream that somewhere ships might even then be setting forth searching for lost worlds. More than that, there’s the hope driving each and every survivor as they explore the unknown and defend themselves, as the fall in love, have children, heal wounds, find old friends, prepare for a performance, as they sit by a water’s edge and watch the silent beauty of sunset. Everyone, embracing the sweetness of life on Earth.
Memory and hope are fact is at the heart of Station Eleven. In chapter tk, Kirsten and August search an abandoned school house, enjoying typical school-kid grafitti – a feast of memory. If the place was familiar and fascinating, the new world raised its head when August found a skeleton in a bathroom with a bullet hole in its head. I want you to think about what memories mean to the new world, with the past divided into before and after. Without memory, what would exist? Memories prove we exist. Think of the debate in Jeevan’s small Virginia town, when someone wondered if pre-pandemic life should be taught in the local school. True, it might upset students, but taking the bad with the good is nothing but the way life is. It’s ironic that the question is interrupted by a man whose wife has been shot by the Prophet – the lost past might contain painful memories, but their new world is acting in miniature like the old one.
