Whiteheads’ Zone One takes a unique approach to the zombie apocalypse. The story takes place in lower Manhattan, with the uninfected building a quarantine zone to avoid the skels. The Skels in this booka re not all dangerous; some of these infected just sit around, as if stuck in a moment of their old lives. After reading the book, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the open ending and the story overall. I looked up some reviews to see what other people thought of this novel. While reading Zone One, one of my first thoughts was how disappointed the avid zombie fan would be with this book. There is hardly any action at all, and everytime we think an action scene is going to take place, Whitehead takes us back to a memory or flashback of some sort. The reviews I found on Amazon certainly helped prove my theory;
Category Archives: Weekly Responses
I want to be a part of it…. Nuke York, Nuke York!
After seeing Mick Brodericks’ exhibit Nuke York, New York, I was really impressed with the amount of research that he has done on the subject. I learned that he travels around the world to collect his material, and he even resorts to ebay to look for vintage art. His dedication to the subject of obvious, and it was clear in his lecture that he was passionate about the end of the world.
The Seven Seals of Fundamentalism: Christians and The Book of Revelation
In Charles Stroziers Essays from the Fundamentalist Mindset (chapter 10), he discusses the 7 seals of fundamentalism. These include violence, time, revenge, paranoia, survivalism, the Elect, and redemption. This reading had much in common with the previous fundamentalist essays, and Strozier once again argues that the Book of Revelation indirectly influences millions of people to take on an apocalyptic mindset.
Watchmen: A New Take on Superheroes and the Apocalypse
When looking at Watchmen today, readers may not recognize how politically and socially significant this comic-style novel truly is. It was originally released as separate comics during the late Cold War era. Our nation was living in a time of nuclear threat, post-Vietnam politics, political disasters such as JFK’s assassination and Watergate. This novel reflects many of the issues that the U.S. was facing in the time it was written.
Marisol Paper
Hi All.
I just thought it’d be interested to see each other’s papers, so for those interested, I’m posting mine here.
-Amy
Amy Gijsbers van Wijk
Final Paper
04 December 2012
The Anti-Apocalypse and the “Book of Revelation”:
Biblical Ramifications of Gender, Sexuality and Dominance in Jose Rivera’s Marisol
The Bible is often looked to as a source of inspiration: for films (from Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat to Passion of the Christ), for musicals (Jesus Christ Superstar), and best-selling book series (the “Left Behind” series). Many of these pieces are culturally-known, often successful creations that take an idea held within the Bible and create a piece in line with its teachings. These pieces of art are often discussed, though whether or not these works of art are continuing the messages of morality and faith proposed is less often analyzed. Continue reading
Observations on Zone One
What I immediately noticed about Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is his use of kairotic time similar to what we had read in “The Albertine Notes”. However, unlike “The Albertine Notes,” the use of kairotic time is easier to follow in Zone One. There is no concept of chronological time in “The Albertine Notes”; instead days are marked by events such as before Albertine or after the blast. In Zone One, events still play a big role in marking time, but there is still a sense of chronology. Whitehead emphasizes the before and after by adding a sense of nostalgia of New York pre-apocalypse.
A Different Kind of Zombie Apocalypse
Whitehead’s Zone One has many component that are common to post-apocalytpic zombie texts. Obviously, an important part to the text is the removal of zombies. Also the story is told with kairotic time and the world is trying to rebuild civilization despite an unstable central government. However, this book is not like most zombie novels, instead of gore and thrill, emotions and personality play a larger role. Continue reading
Zone One: All Places At Once
Reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, I was reminded most of one reading in particular – Rick Mood’s The Albertine Notes. As Colby mentions in her post, I too found myself getting lost amongst the time in Mark Spitz’s world because he so often slips from pre-Last Day to post-Last Day.
What stuck out to me the most was the relationship, if I can call it that, between Mark Spitz and the skels. On one hand, there was this desire to recognize their humanness, and in a sense it is completely unavoidable. There is the fact that he sees skels and automatically associates them with people he “knew;” his desire to leave “Ned the copy boy” alone; his noticing of thongs – all of these things show that, in this knew world ruled by military organization and tactical emotion-quelling, he struggles to reconcile the pre-Last Day with this “new” world.
I did also love the fact that Whitehead doesn’t allow for this novel to become a hack-‘n’-slash, Zombie-hating kind of story, which I feel it easily could have. He instead ties in elements, like Mark Spitz’s emotionalism, that allow for the reader to feel, and notice, moments of connect and disconnect. There is the fact that PTSD becomes PASD, and that all of the sweepers are heavily aware that their jobs are both allowing some closer and completely screwing up their psychological relations to the dead, the Apocalypse, and their place in this new world.
Lastly, the language in Whitehead’s book is so concise and crisp, which I think fits the processing one’s mind would go through in the new world. One would focus and process things in terms of essential-ness: “What is the essential knowledge about what I am doing? What memories? What thoughts?” in a way that one can easily be thrown off track, but also make associations. I found this interpretation (as someone who tends to dislike both violence and zombies in entertainment) much more rewarding than the more violent, kill-em-dead types of entertainment that often utilize military ethics, control, and violence in regards to zombies and the Apocalypse.
The Everyman and the Apocalypse
I hate to admit that I didn’t do this week’s reading, especially given that I love novels and was looking forward to “real zombies” making their appearance in this course. Even though I swear that I grabbed “Zone One” on my first trip to grab stuff from Brookdale, I can’t find it in that suitcase. I would have emailed Professor Quinby, if not for my sad habit of waiting to the last possible minute to work. I hope to read it sometime following my return to Brookdale. Until then I can only theorize on what happened in the book based on reviews, both on Amazon and from professionals and the excerpt at Amazon.com.
Zombies are a popular metaphor for brainwashed masses. Zombification results in the sense of homogeneity that some argue is found in embracing popular culture and incorporating mass expectation into one’s life style. Thus I found it interesting that the narrator of Zone One, a person that has apparently outlived the existence of life as we know it, introduce himself as unremarkably common even as he heads out on a noteworthy mission. The average person is capable of overcoming adversity and adapting to new situations. This sort of higher sense of activity or awareness and/or ascension to a higher plain under a religious leader is a fairly big part of why some people fantasize about the end of time. People want to believe that they are important, even if they do not seem exceptional. However, the existence of zombies show that mass lifestyle changes can be problematic if people cannot recognize themselves.I believe the zombie is a personal apocalypse that plays out in the public sphere, affecting the masses both with and without the central demon’s consent. Perhaps, this is what makes zombies, with their obvious losses, a post-apocalyptic staple, both in movies and in video games.
The Zombie Fixation and Zone One
From day one in our class, the buzz about zombies has been present and persisted, despite the vast majority of our material not being zombie-related. Being a fan of zombies myself, I’ve always wondered what it was about them–and the prospect of a zombie apocalypse–that draws so many of us in. Reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, I felt he highlighted something about zombies that I had never picked up one: wish fulfillment.
In a scene towards the beginning of the book, when Mark encounters four zombies that had been cooped up in the break room of a legal office, he muses about being an angel of death with a chilling amount of glee. From that passage, it was clear that a part of Mark enjoyed participating in the apocalypse’s carnage. That’s when it hit me:
On some level, we’d all love to go on a killing spree.
We’re all imbued with that primal energy–that Freudian Id–which gives us a capacity for violence. These thoughts are curbed by our learning and internalizing of societal rules (like don’t murder people). Both of these attributes make sense in an evolutionary sense: those that were strongest and best at fighting got to pass on more of their genes over the course of many generations, and likewise those that could cooperate effectively also succeeded in dominating the gene pool. A zombie apocalypse lets us toss off our societal shackles and appease our violent impulses without having to deal with the moral hangups that accompany murder. Zombie apocalypse scenarios are–purely and simply–guiltless indulgences of our primal predisposition to violence.
