Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is the first piece of literature besides the graphic TWD novels I’ve read that involves humans living with zombies on Earth. I’ve seen almost every episode of TWD with the exception of the two most recent seasons; I was studying abroad in London during Season 9 and experiencing a pandemic during the delayed premier of Season 10, so keep spoilers away from the comments! With that being said, I have seen the first 8 seasons and may discuss content from what I’ve seen, so you have been warned about spoilers! Besides TWD, my favorite zombie movie narratives include World War Z, I Am Legend, and Warm Bodies, each with unique relationships between both species and cures or lack thereof. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is similar to Warm Bodies in that there are multiple zombie species with varying abilities. Whitehead splits his zombies into dangerous and rapid skels and slow and sluggish stragglers. The main narrator, Mike Spitz shares accounts from three days in total in the novel, and shares unique insights on relationships with humans who are still alive and between the two zombie species. I found many connections with these zombie works, but I found three in particular that resonated with TWD that made these real-world concepts more real and engaging. “That wall out there has to work. The barricade is the only metaphor left in this mess. The last one standing. Keep chaos out, order in.” When the Lieutenant describes the wall encircling NYC, specifically the island of Manhattan, I immediately envisioned the chaos of so many walls that physically broke in TWD, including the Prison’s fences from a walker invasion invited by the evil Governor, Woodbury’s fall brought on by the Governor’s choice of self destruction, and Alexandria’s first fall invaded by Negan’s crew. All of this destruction is met with zombie forces, but humans are also at fault in every instance, and they are at fault in in ˆZone One, too. It isn’t known what exactly brings the large zombie herd in Zone One’s last Sunday, but the mythology surrounding the wall and it’s falsifying comfort of safety is what interests me, similar to the notion of safety in TWD. In a post-apocalyptic world, safety and comfort is a privilege, and I find fault in the destructive nature of sweeping the zombies out of NYC and cleansing the city of its impact by burning the bodies. While these zombies don’t sound like pleasant species to cohabit a space, they are never given a chance, especially the harmless stragglers. I find ethical dilemmas in eliminating the stragglers in addition to the skels, but Sunday’s ultimate fall is ominous and somewhat foreshadowed in Spitz’ thoughts and internal commentary on the stragglers’ peculiarity as a species and their existence in the same space. “Before the rise of the camps, out in the land, you had to watch out for other people. The dead were predictable. People were not.” I have always been emotionally invested in the human characters of TWD narrative, and emotionally torn when beloved characters like Glenn and Carl were killed. More so, characters like the Governor and Negan were certainly more dangerous than the dead because they were, like Whitehead points out, far more unpredictable than the dead. The first few seasons of TWD reveal how the characters interact with the walkers and survive. As power complexes and tensions rise initially when characters like Shane become wildly unpredictable and display erratic behavior, I quickly became more afraid of the human characters than the walkers themselves. Of course, in mass numbers seen in the seasons with Alpha, those numbers were quite frightening, but the mind control and manipulation that Alpha possessed over her daughter and her clan of followers was more disturbing than any walker.
I can observe similar manipulation of the government using civilians on sweeps to clean the streets of NYC to eliminate the zombie population, keeping the sick and already dead out beyond the wall. Some of the characters even played games with the stragglers and defiled them before killing them, which I found extremely disturbing and despicable behavior. I felt untrustworthy towards a lot of Whitehead’s characters, including the main narrator Mark Spitz simply because the fragmented timelines and flashbacks mimicked a real-life three-day weekend where flashbacks would probably occur. This makes the reading more lifelike of what this apocalyptic world would feel like, but it still made me uncomfortable in the right moments to make me more weary of humans than zombies.
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ALV
4/27/2021 06:00:34 am
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AuthorCreative writer + professional & technical writer. TWD enthusiast. Archives
April 2021
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