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In the novel Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel expresses how life is a repeating cycle of common experiences through her non-linear writing style. These experiences include death, survival, and art. The importance of these topics are emphasized by the use of her non-linear writing technique.
First, death is a common motif that is among the cycle of experiences seen throughout the novel. The audience first reads about death at the beginning of the novel with Arthur. He was performing onstage, when suddenly he fell and grabbed his chest.
A few people rushed onstage but “Arthur wasn’t breathing” (4). He had a heart attack and unfortunately didn’t survive. Mandel then chooses to skip forward twenty years to when 99 percent of the world's population had been wiped out from the Georgia Flu. This is the first time we can see the authors non-linear writing style. Mandel chooses to present death on a personal and global level to compare the two which starts the cycle of common experiences.
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In fact, Mandel uses juxtaposition by comparing Arthur’s death to the death of billions of people worldwide to show that death is a prevalent occurrence and one of life’s repeating experiences. Mandel, purposely chooses to fit most of the death in the beginning chapters to emphasize its importance in this novel and to introduce one of life’s common, repeating experiences.
Another regular occurrence seen a lot in the book is survival. When there is death there is also survival, or at least the attempt of survival.
In Station Eleven, not many people in the book survived because the plague wiped out nearly the entire world. Although, the book focuses mostly on the few characters who did survive the flu. The story highlights the extremes that many characters have to go to in order to survive. For example, Kirsten Raymonde had tattoos of knives on her body to show how many people she was forced to kill to stay alive during the apocalypse. She also said, “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” (139). This quote shows how she viewed survival, and how she would do anything to protect herself and stay alive during this hard time. Another example is from Jeevan’s brother, Frank. When Frank realized that he was holding his brother down and hurting his chances of survival, Frank killed himself. This action showed how serious survival was for these people and how similar death and survival truly are together. Yet another occurrence of survival in the novel comes from an additional tattoo on Kirsten’s body. This tattoo was a few words that said, “survival is insufficient”. This means that Kirsten believes if one just focuses on how to survive their entire life, than they aren’t actually “living”. All of these statements about survival help to form another motif seen in Station Eleven. Also, the writing technique used by Mandel helps
A third topic that is heavily focused on in Station Eleven is art. Mandel believes that art is one of the things these characters who are extremely focused on survival can express interest in and that will help them to actually be living, not just surviving. In this novel, art is seen as a something that will never go away. Even during the apocalypse there is a need for art, even though it’s not necessarily needed for surviving. From the beginning of the book all the way to the end, the topic of art can be seen in almost every chapter. For example, in the very first scene, Arthur acting in Shakespeare’s King Lear, art is presented as a form of entertainment and something that many people can enjoy. Another person who used art to help in their daily life was Miranda. She created the Dr. Eleven comics, which helped her escape from all the stressful events happening in her life.
Many of the main characters rely on art to help them in daily lives.
Mandel shows how art is still relevant in a destroyed world some of the main characters heavily relied on to get them
What Emily St. John Mandel Expresses. (2022, Jan 28). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/what-emily-st-john-mandel-expresses-essay
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