English 12
Unit 4: Novel Study
Question Set #3
Core Option
1.
The essential question we've been thinking about in this unit is "How does story deepen our
understanding of complex societal issues?" What societal issues are highlighted? What is the author
saying about them?
Emily St. John-Mandel used the apocalyptic setting to explore the unique impacts societal collapse would have on those whose safety and livelihoods
depend on it, such as women and disabled people. In a North America ravaged by cults, women and girls are often treated as commodities to be bought and sold;
the novel’s antagonist, “The Prophet”, has a penchant for claiming young girls as child brides. Roving bandits, like the brigands Kirsten remembers asking her for
“...food, four hourses, and a woman…” in Chapter 43, also use women as currency. Even in the Severn City Airport, where a far healthier community had been
formed, there was still violence against women. This is to be expected, as with the collapse of criminal justice systems many men have nothing stopping them from
“taking” what they feel entitled to. In Chapter 43, after a woman is raped, Clark and several others drive the man into the forest and threaten him at gunpoint that if
he returns he will be shot. “I’ll die out here alone”, the rapist pled, but Clarke and the others realized that in a world without police or prisons to keep men like him
in check, they had no obligation to take the humanitarian road: “...they agreed, but what else could they do?”. In Chapter 50, Kirsten thinks back on a similar
experience of her own, in which she stabbed and killed a man who was trying to rape her. “It’s a physiological response to danger,” Dieter had told her, but Kirsten
was still traumatized by her response: “...there was nothing in her memories to account for how calm she was afterward, when she pulled her knife from the man’s
throad and cleaned it…” She then reveals this is why she didnt remember her year on the road, saying “Whatever that year on the road contained, [Kirsten] realized,
it was nothing she wanted to know about.” I find this to be a realistic explanation of Kirsten’s memory dilemma, as amnesia is a common trauma response that can
occur both consciously and unconsciously. Overall, I think the way that Station Eleven examines both the lawlessness and vigilanteeism that could occur in a postapocalyptic society, with particular regard to the treatment of women and girls, is one of the more compelling aspects of the book. Another issue touched on in the
novel was disability in a post-apocalyptic world. In Chapter 43, teenager Lily Patterson runs away from the Severn City Airport, never to be seen again, after
withdrawal from Effexor causes her to enter a state of psychosis. Clark laments that the stranded passengers bonded together and searched the entire building and
vicinity for the drug, but had failed to find any of the drug. In Chapter 45, “Third Cello” reveals their parents, both diabetics, succumbed to ketoacidosis after
running out of Insulin. Later on in that same chapter, the audience finally learns how Kirsten’s brother died: an infection he contracted by stepping on a dirty nail. I
find these details especially relevant in the post-COVID era, as the world seems to have grown less and less appreciative of modern medicine. They made me think
about my Unit 2 speech assignment and how little appreciation the general public has for the antibiotics that save so many lives today, and how little awareness of
what we risk losing to antibiotic resistance. Frank’s suicide, which occurred in the middle section of the book, was disturbing but likely a realistic outcome for
someone who cannot survive without properly-maintained accessible infrastructure. One thing I disliked about the book’s interpretation of disability is that while
it’s entirely realistic for Disabled people to have a decreased chance at survival in a post-apocalyptic world, I felt like including even one example of a Disabled
character who had adapted to their environment and was supported by their community wouldn’t have undermined the book’s message.
2.
What was your response to the ending of the novel? What questions are you left with?
Honestly, I was very disappointed by the ending. The way the conflict with the Prophet came to a head was utterly anti-climactic; I found it strange that
despite him popping back into the story unexpectedly, there was zero suspense or excitement. I was hoping that during the time Kirsten and the Prophet interact,
we would learn something new or interesting about him, as his relation to Arthur and therefore Station Eleven had been “foreshadowed” into the ground, however
instead we received a rambling speech devoid of any insight into his character. I actually laughed when Kirsten was able to distract him by chiming in with lines from
the Station Eleven comic, as it seemed like a cruel joke of the author to have the audience wait so far into the book for such a pathetic ending to her villain’s arc. In
Chapter 50, the Prophet reveals he remembers Kirsten from her performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in St. Deborah by the Water by calling her “Titania”,
yet when Kirsten asks him for his name, he responds “Sometimes names are an encumbrance. Where are your companions?”. The Prophet then asks Kirsten a
couple questions about his runaway archer, the first of two of the Prophet’s “devoted” followers to betray him for no apparent reason in Chapters 49 and 50 alone;
Tyler is seemingly unbothered by this. Emily St. John-Mandel then abandoned all effort to make her villain any more believable than those of the Station Eleven
graphic novels, by having Tyler go off on a schizoid rant that completely undermined any idea I had of him as some hyper-intelligent master manipulator. “I have
walked all my life through this tarnished world, and I have seen such darkness, such shadows and horrors. This world is an ocean of darkness…” the Prophet
rambles, before he and Kirsten start into the Station Eleven rap battle and then the Prophet is killed in the blink of an eye. St. John-Mandel’s insistence on dumbing
down her villain by making him a parody of every single other doomsday cultist ever written, who spouts endless barrages of cliches and whose actions require him
at times to be entirely inept and at others, a calculated, cunnning mastermind. I don’t know if I’m using this term correctly, but the way the Prophet’s death played
out, with his henchman shooting him from behind and then promptly shooting himself in the head before the reader gets any real explanation as to what happened,
seems like deus ex machina. We didn’t get any new information about the Prophet from the climax to him being killed off and the conflict being resolved, and as the
Prophet was barely in the story before now, having a single chapter devoted to his re-appearance and immediate death felt entirely unsatisfying. This felt so strange
to me, as considering there was so much foreshadowing of a special relationship between Kirsten and the Prophet during their only other interaction, which was in
St. Deborah by the Water, I really thought more would have come out of this. The final chapter, which focuses on Clark’s ponderings after showing Kirsten the lit-up
village he had discovered, felt like an incomplete ending to the story. “If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what
else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, travelling towards or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and
knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side?” Clark muses to himself. “ If nothing
else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, towards another world just out of sight.” This is no different from
any of the other reminiscent fluff that occupied 90% of the story. So much time had already been spent on material like this that I was so disappointed we didn’t get
anything new. It also just felt like lazy writing to have characters spend the entire book agonizing over the loss of electricity, establishing that even 20 years after the
war people are still unable to generate power, only to have a random town at the end have fully functioning power.
3.
Often, a novelist introduces ideas and clues in the first part of the book that play out throughout the
book. Reread the first chapter of your book and identify some of the clues that the novelist planted
there.
While I started the book listening to the audiobook, by the time I finished I had bought a physical copy and was using it to make notes. When I re-read
the first chapter, I used physical text so I could highlight sections in the text that stood out as indicative of events to come later in the story. The first thing that stuck
out to me was Jeevan’s description of the stage he stood upon after running up and trying in vain to resuscitate Arthur Leander after his heart attack: “Not quite a
room… It was too transitory, all those doorways and dark spaces between wings, the missing ceiling. It was more like a terminal, he thought, a train station or an
airport, everyone passing quickly through.” On my first reading, I didn’t notice this as a potential reference to the book’s title, but on my second read I noticed it
immediately as a reference to the Station Eleven graphic novels and Severn City Airport (as well as the symbol of airplanes/flight used throughout the book), all of
which play a major part in the story. Knowing that the Georgia Flu is about to engulf Toronto and the world at large, it’s eerie reading how all the people coming and
going from the theatre make Jeevan compare it to a terminal, since travel (airports, planes, roads, The Travelling Symphony, etc…) is used to demonstrate the initial
spread of the virus and is also made a symbol of survivors’ yearning for paradise lost. Later on in the first chapter, Tanya, the child actors’ handler, is first introduced
as “[the] young woman with a tear-streaked face” who collects Kirsten from Jeevan, presumably after breaking down somewhere more private. Right from the first
time I read this, I assumed she was having an affair with Arthur. While I was correct, I feel a bit confused looking back as I had originally assumed that Tanya’s
character would play a role in explaining Arthur’s final days (which were spent on King Lear), however her character appears only twice in the novel (including the
first chapter). I felt that many of the book’s characters were similar to Tanya in that they existed for the sole purpose of connecting the main characters to each
other, and therefore suffered from a lack of depth. That being said, however, the hints about Tanya’s secret endeavours with Arthur did pull me in at the beginning
of the story. If didn’t then I wouldn’t have felt disappointed by her lack of consequence on any events in the story.
4.
Every novel is structured differently. Some are written in chronological format, starting at the beginning
of the story and following a traditional plot arc to the end. Others are written in an episodic form, with
a series of stories that are loosely connected, but do not necessarily build on each other. Others are
structured in different ways. What do you notice about the structure of your novel? Why might the
author have chosen this approach?
In the beginning, the way the story jumped between characters and across time and place really helped pull me in, however when it became time for
different storylines to start wrapping up, I felt unmoved by the deaths of characters we regularly spent long stretches of the book hearing nothing about. The
kidnappings of Dieter and Sayid happened so early on in the book, for example, that by the time Kirsten and August encounter a bloodied and gaunt Sayid walking
down the road, flanked by three of the Prophet’s men, the ensuing fight is entirely unsuspenseful, both because it lasted only a paragraph and because Sayid was
barely in the story before being kidnapped, leaving the reader unconcerned about his survival. After winning the fight, Kirsten interrogates one of the Prophet’s
archers, who lies bloodied on the ground, as to why they kidnapped Dieter and Sayid. The boy responds that The Travelling Symphony had taken something that
belonged to them, and when Kirsten is confused, replying “We took nothing. I have no idea what you’re talking about…”, Sayid clarifies: “The girl… He’s talking
about the stowaway”. In true Station Eleven fashion, Sayid is referring to Eleanor, a young girl we met briefly in Part 2 who ran away from St. Deborah by the Water
after being “claimed” as the Prophet’s next bride. She is yet another character who leaves the story undeveloped and then returns at random when the plot needs a
loose end tied up. While the novel is hindered by its structure at key moments, I think that the transitions between characters, as well as the plotlines connecting
them would have been much more compelling and believeable if the story simply used fewer characters and spent more time with each of them. Ultimately, the
main issue with Station Eleven’s writing style is that by the time anything foreshadowed comes to fruition, the readers have already spent so many chapters reading
other storylines that there is no sense of satisfaction. The book desperately needs either another 20 to 50 pages of plot OR a rewrite that covers fewer stories in
more detail, as any reader who paid attention to details across the various storylines predicted 90% of the ending around the book’s halfway point, yet still had to
suffer through the bitter end of what could’ve been a compelling story.
5.
One of the big ideas in the curriculum is this: The exploration of text and story deepens our
understanding of diverse, complex ideas about identity, others, and the world. In what ways has this
novel deepened your understanding about your identity, other people, or the world?
While I was really disappointed by the novel’s ending, that’s only because I began reading with complete adoration for Emily St. John Mandel’s writing,
which I initially appreciated the long, meandering tone of. Despite my patience for the novel’s style wearing thin, I still appreciated reading a lot of characters’ “love
letters to modern society”, as they brought a strangely heartwarming tone to the novel. For all the brutal scenes in this book, it was still less bleak that any other
dystopia I’ve read. In Chapter 37, the reader hears a snippet from Kirsten Raymonde and Francois Diallo’s interview, in which the two look back on the days of
refrigeration. “......I remember how you could open a fridge, and cold air and light would spill out. Or freezers, even colder, with those little squares of ice in trays.
Do you remember fridges?” Kirsten asks Diallo. “Of course. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one used for anything other than shelving space”, Diallo replies. “And
they had light inside as well as cold, right? I’m not just imagining this?”. “They had light inside”, said Diallo with a smile. In Chapter 40, Arthur’s reference to Orange
Julius was actually really meaningful to me, as it’s something that reminds me of home that I’d never anticipated ever reading about in a non-fiction novel. In
Chapter 43, when Clarke reminiscesed about the marvels of factories, shipping freighters, and international trade I also felt seen, as while there are many issues
with modern consumerism, the loss of industry to a world-eating virus would cause even more death and destruction to fall upon those to survive. In a way, I saw
the book’s reminiscent passages as little answers throughout to the existential questions it poses: What is humanity? What is survival? Although St. John-Mandel did
often spend too much time on some of the small details, there were many throughout the course of the novel that stuck out to me. Most often, they were the type
of things that don’t get covered by more pretentious authors who’d rather spend the entire book talking about how awful we humans and our societies are and
how the destruction of our species would simply be karma for our evildoings upon nature. In order to take action upon The Travelling Symphony’s motto that
“Survival is Inefficient”, both the characters and readers must find a reason to stay alive through times of great struggle. I like how the novel recognizes positive
aspects of modern society, as it helps the readers see how much we have worth fighting for when it comes to modern issues like climate change.