Art and Culture

Mandel takes the reader on a journey that questions many facets of art. Characters pursue their artistic endeavours in various ways and for various goals. Pre- and post-collapse worlds contain the basic human need to express one’s self and create, no matter the circumstances. Miranda is the creator of the comics and graphic novels and is set on creating art for her own enjoyment. Although published after many years, the process was Miranda’s reward and she commented that she did not care if anyone else saw her work. Juxtaposed with this artistic endeavour was her boyfriend and his hope of selling art for a living and Arthur who used his artistic expression to reach fame and success. The Symphony finds purpose in its artistic performances and it ‘casts a spell’ on audiences bringing them much needed relief from their harsh new world.

The definition of art is broad as photographs snapped by paparazzi survive the fall and are treasured alongside conventional works like a Shakespearean play. The question of the relevance of ‘old’ art is raised by characters who believe modern plays should replace the classics. Moreover, Mandel shows all art as enduring and important.

Art and Culture Quotes

They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.
‘People want what was best about the world,’ Dieter said. Chapter 7

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Chapter 11

The lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient. Chapter 11

‘You don’t have to understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s mine.’ (Miranda) Chapter 14

‘I’ve been thinking about immortality lately. … They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.’ (Frank) Chapter 34

Survival, Life and Death

No ‘end of the world’ novel can avoid raising issues of survival, life and death. Station Eleven opens with an individual’s passing on the eve of the death of the majority of the world’s population, a contrast that is interrogated throughout the novel. Mandel uses a few specific and tragic deaths to show how personal death is and consequently, how precious life is. Despite the backdrop of mass death, each person is shown at one time to be a precious life. At the same time, lost among the statistics of the Georgia Flu, many pass unmourned. The novel comments on how a celebrity death, like Arthur Leander’s, is often highlighted while the passing of other lives goes largely unnoticed. Kirsten’s ritual of tattooing her wrist for any life she was forced to take shows that even her enemy’s lives were noteworthy.

There are aspects to survival that the characters must negotiate. The random nature of surviving the Flu has largely divided the living. Some are happy to embrace it as a piece of luck, a statistical windfall. Clark assesses how lucky he is passing through contaminated airports and being on a diverted flight without any contaminated passengers while Jeevan’s survival is attributed to luck, a friend’s warning call, perhaps the disillusion with his girlfriend at the time sending him into survival mode and saving him and his brother. Others are willing to designate a theistic hand that has determined who is saved and why, exemplified by the Prophet who views the diverted flight as an archetypal Noah’s ark saving people for a divine purpose. Survival is not just through chance or purpose but characters survive through skill and decisions. A hunter provides food for those in the terminal. Kirsten’s knife tattoos document the people she has had to kill. Jeevan reacts quickly to source food and barricade himself in an apartment. Frank’s sacrifices himself to assist Jeevan’s survival.

However, the novel presses further and questions what survival means. Living is not survival, as the Travelling Symphony motto points out, ‘Survival is Insufficient’. True survival is living, and living life full of art, music and passion, with humanity for humanity. Beyond this, Mandel examines the type of legacy which survives the characters and groups.

Survival, Life and Death Quotes

In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. ‘To Arthur,’ they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm.
Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city. Chapter 2

‘People want what was best about the world,’ Dieter said. Chapter 7

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Chapter 11

‘The flu,’ the prophet said, ‘the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago, that flu was our flood. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved.’ Chapter 12

‘If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.’ (Prophet) Chapter 23

‘The kind of stupid death that never would’ve happened in the old world. He stepped on a nail and died of infection.’ (Kirsten) Chapter 45

He wasn’t specifically sad anymore, but he was aware of death at all times (Clark) Chapter 47

Faith

Faith is evident in the post-collapse world as characters struggle to make sense of a catastrophe. It signals how the ‘sleepwalking zombies’ had forgotten to look for a spiritual life as they went about daily life but were quick to find one when rudely awakened by disaster. The role of traditional organised religion in Station Eleven is sparse. Other than the Prophet, there is no overt sign of Christianity’s survival after the collapse. It is a post-Christian landscape except for the polygamist, violent, unmerciful Tyler and his followers. However, obvious perversion of traditional faith as shown by the Prophet is only a small example of human nature’s need for a belief system outside of their own practical life. August, who religiously prays over the dead bodies he encounters, wishing them peace, constructs parallel universes to ease the burden on the life he is living.

Despite the disappearance or lack of organised or traditional belief structure, it is hope in a greater future that prevails. Characters hoping that there is something else are drawn together, with something unnamed, almost divine, urging them to perform Shakespeare and seek friends in dangerous towns. They are believers.

Faith Quotes

The prophet was still talking, about faith and light and destiny, divine plans revealed to him in dreams. Chapter 12

‘We can only remain hopeful,’ he said. ‘We have to assume that the situation will become more clear.’ (August) Chapter 23

August believed in the theory of multiple universes. He claimed this was straight-up physics, as he put it, or if not exactly mainstream physics then maybe the outer edge of quantum mechanics, or anyway definitely not just some crackpot theory he’d made up. Chapter 38

Later that summer a band of religious wanderers arrived, headed south. The precise nature of their religion was unclear. ‘A new world requires new gods,’ they said. Chapter 44

‘Have faith,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll find them.’ (August) Chapter 48

Civilisation

Station Eleven resists the urge to categorise civilisation or paint it in broad strokes such as dystopian or utopian. Instead it depicts civilization as a fragile yet ongoing construct. In one moment civilisation is brought to a seeming halt. All things that represent a civilised and advanced society cease; planes, phones, electricity, cars and ships are redundant. The immediate aftermath reveals a society that is ruthless and lawless. Kirsten herself is forced to commit violent acts. As time progresses society begins to rebuild, a newspaper here, flickering lights there.

Civilisation is in some ways held to account for its part in the catastrophe. It is the interconnected nature of a globalised world made possible through advancing civilisation which provides a platform for the virus to spread as wide and fast as it does. Once reduced to a new base, we see what makes a civilisation: the people, art and culture. The novel brings hope that civilisation will emerge from the destruction, unscathed in important ways, as a new world of people who believe and fight for the idea that ‘Survival is Insufficient’.

Civilisation Quotes

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. Chapter 6

‘People want what was best about the world,’ Dieter said. Chapter 7

‘Help you?’ he asked. His tone wasn’t unfriendly, and this was the pleasure of being alive in Year Twenty, this calmer age. For the first ten or twelve years after the collapse, he would have been much more likely to shoot them on sight. (Finn) Chapter 24

Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? Chapter 24

On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. Chapter 30

‘After I was shot, when they told me I wouldn’t walk again and I was lying in the hospital, I spent a lot of time thinking about civilization. What it means and what I value in it. I remember thinking that I never wanted to see a war zone again, as long as I live. I still don’t.’ (Frank) Chapter 32

In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity. Chapter 51