“I eat the brain and, for about thirty seconds, I have memories. Flashes of parades,perfume, music . . . life. Then it fades, and I get up, and we all stumble out of the city, still cold and grey, but feeling a little better. Not ‘good’, exactly, not ‘happy’, certainly not ‘alive’, but . . . a little less dead. This is the best we can do”
R’s reminiscences come to life as a result of ingesting the prey’s brain. The reconstruction of remembrances confers R the sensitivity of dynamism. Although the commemorations are not sustained afterwards, R validates that the brain the stowage for history. Perhaps, the zombies’ brains are shattered by mortality making it knotty for them to marshal compact recollections.
“Before, when I was alive, I could never have done this. Standing still, watching the world pass by me, thinking about nearly nothing. I remember effort. I remember targets and deadlines, goals and ambitions. I remember being purposeful, always everywhere all the time. Now I’m just standing here on the conveyor, along for the ride. I reach the end,turn around, and go back the other way. The world has been distilled. Being dead is easy.”
The Live versus Dead binary emphatically dictates this passage. R’s scrutiny exemplifies the unadorned discrepancies that discriminate the living domain from the dead’s realm. The living prosper through resolutions whereas the dead are irrational. Death disregards the skirmishes that are typical in humans’ lifespan; hence, it is a discharging standing that bestows the dead a breather from life’s grinds.
“When I met your mom,’ he says, ‘I asked myself that. And all we had going on back then was a few wars and recessions... He ignores it. ‘I got nineteen years with your mom. But do you think I would’ve turned down the idea if I’d known I’d only get one year? Or one month?’ He surveys the construction, shaking his head slowly. ‘There’s no benchmark for how life’s “supposed” to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it’s up to you how you respond to it.”
This retort is a rejoinder Perry’s probe on the quintessence of love. Perry Kelvin’s father instigated ‘Carpe Diem’ creed in his marital realm. He did not ground his verdicts on the qualms that the ‘wars and recessions’ embodied. Trailing ideal benchmarks to model one’s existence cheers procrastination. Perry’s father is of the outlook that being should be in the present for the future cannot be transformed through variable yardsticks. Perhaps, if Perry’s father had grounded his life on idealistic standards, Perry’s being would not have materialized.
“The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event ‘super-venues’ built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties. From the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float.”
The passage blatantly incorporates an explicit religious allusion of ‘Noah’s ark’ The allusion intensifies the inimitability of Julie’s abode which is dissimilar from Noah’s ark for it would not float. The drab walls illustrate an imagery of a gothic glimpse that would only be supreme for zombies. The abode magnifies Gothicism in Warm Bodies.
