*Exclusive* Unpacking and Revealing the Secrets of Station Eleven

Hey, this is Sungwoo Park. Today, we will unpack and evaluate Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Station Eleven was published in September 2014, and this novel is Mandel’s fourth novel. The novel was included in the list for the New York Time Bestseller.

With a concept of dystopia, Mandel starts the novel in a theater where an actor who plays King Lear unexpectedly dies. Jeevan, who tries to save Arthur’s life on the stage, receives a call from his friend that a plane, containing plenty of patients, has arrived from Russia. Mandel informs the readers that the Georgia Flu pandemic has begun, and ninety-nine percent of the human population gets eliminated because of this deadly disease. She also changes the main character from Jeevan to Kirsten, who was a young girl at the theater that observed Arthur’s death. Being a part of a traveling symphony that performs Shakespeare’s plays long after the pandemic, Kirsten faces a challenge with the group as two members of the symphony, Charlie and Jeremy, disappear two years after they temporarily left the group. Although Kirsten was at a Canadian theater a couple of decades ago, borders, countries, and rules have vanished after the epidemic. Along the way, Mandel adds flashbacks of how Kirsten has been obsessed to Arthur; she, when she was young, collected news articles that featured Arthur, a former Hollywood star. Anyways, Kirsten and her symphony decide to confront ‘the prophet’, who has been a religious fanatic and an inappropriate leader of the town where Charlie and Jeremy has lived. In the Museum of Civilization, where it has antiquated goods, such as cellphones, laptops that existed before the apocalypse, Mandel attempts to portray how tragic and disorganized a post-apocalyptic Earth can be in her dystopian novel.

In general, Mandel’s plot is extremely creative and unique. Unlike most of the dystopian novels that tend to have a tragic introduction, Station Eleven starts in a fairly ordinary, peaceful setting: a Shakespeare theatre in Toronto. The readers, including the writer, probably did not acknowledge a dystopian plot of this novel until a Russian plane with patients arrive. Her depictions of a devastating, stark society after the apocalypse are vivid and force the readers to imagine the calamity and feel intimidated. “No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, please, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone. No more avatars” (Mandel 32). This quotation, which appears right after the disaster occurs, strongly alerts many teenaged readers who waste much time in their lifetimes procrastinating on social medias. Since almost everyone commonly has active Facebook and Twitter accounts, Mandel attempts to frighten the readers and to inform them this pandemic can happen to us in real life at anytime.

Despite the warnings and the tragedies that Station Eleven contain, Mandel, through this novella, proves her skills in projecting her voice effectively through various techniques. Her sentences differ in length depending on what her purposes are in certain sentences or phrases. When she tries to vividly describe a situation, she elongates the sentence so that the readers have enough time to imagine the sceneries. However, whenever she attempts to convey a strong point or to inform a sudden transition, her sentences are concise and vigorous.

If the world faces a collapse or an unexpected apocalypse, what is the one thing you will try to keep? Through her novella, Mandel emphasizes the importance of art in our daily lifestyles; her affection towards Shakespearean music and plays are obvious to detect throughout the novel. Even when happiness and rules disappeared from the planet, a traveling symphony still exists in order to invigorate exhausted, spiritless souls. In addition, through creating another setting of the story called the Museum of Civilization that displays all goods we currently use in real life, Mandel conveys to her readers that every matter could be historical artifacts and assets in the future. Overall, Mandel, taking her view and endless imaginations to the future, argues that not only survival but preservation of art is also essential for human beings to keep moving forward despite harsh challenges and conditions.

In a perspective of a teen reader evaluating a New York Times bestseller, this novel truly is a pinnacle of creativity and uniqueness compared to all renowned and successful dystopian novels.