Zombies, Perspective, And How We "know" The World

By Author: emaly su
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The reaction of most of my students likely mirrored that of their parents when first told they would spend the next few weeks studying zombies.

Faces reflected equal parts confusion and disbelief. How could an English teacher justify spending time on this seemingly disposable aspect of popular culture? And how did we get so lucky to not have to do "real" work this semester:* In reality, however, there was much "real" work to be done, and we began immediately.

Fortunately, I Am Legend is a thought-provoking novel that addresses familiar literary themes in a unique fashion, and as such it is as legitimate a selection for a literature classroom as any other. The protagonist of the novel, Robert Neville, is the embodiment of isolation, a theme ...
... not only central to every subsequent zombie film and book but also common to literature in general.

Neville is determined to understand why he is the last man on earth and how the world could have turned into the nightmare it has, and through his perspective we begin to understand how he sees the world. Neville becomes symbolic of how perspective determines our understanding of how the world works. Early in the zombie unit, I hinted that this thematic unit would look at how we understand the world through zombies.

In / Am Legend, Neville literally does just this. He seeks to understand how the world became a land of the walking dead: what events transpired to create his situation, how science could explain the seemingly unexplainable, and how he would be able to continue his survival, regardless of his isolation. Moreover, like my students and I were trying to do, Neville stumbles on cultural truths as well as scientific ones on his journey to understand his world. At the end of the novel, Neville is captured by a new society formed among those vampires who have managed to adapt to their new reality.

Neville learns that he will be publicly executed, and the social function his death will serve drips with irony. Neville realizes that although he had for years been thinking of himself as the sole survivor of "normal" human culture and of the vampires/zombies as aberrations, his planned execution was designed to benefit the fearful crowds of vampires by letting them witness the death of this man, this creature that for so long had hunted and killed their own.

For Neville, this is the ultimate irony, as his obsession with the legend of the vampire blinded him to the truth of that legend. It is a legend centered on fear of the unknown. To Neville's horror, rather than fighting against the legend of the vampires, he has himself become that legend.

My students were quick to pick up on connections between Neville and their experiences with modern culture. One student commented on how similar the vampires' situation was, in some respects, to women, who are considered (or at least treated as) a minority when in fact women outnumber men in terms of population. Other students pointed out how this was also the case with other minority groups.

That while Caucasians still retained most of the political and financial power in our country, minority groups such as African Americans and Latinos/Lati-nas were quickly becoming majorities in parts of the country.

The twist of the novel illustrated in a powerful way the nature of hegemony and how power does not always stem from numbers but from the longstanding privilege of some groups over others. For the most part, students read the final paragraphs of 7 Am Legend, and especially Neville's attitude regarding his impending doom, understanding that it was Neville's egocentric worldview that was at least in part to blame for his demise.