"You think we're going to end up here? We ain't special. They're going to put the rich people here. Politicians and pro athletes. Those chefs from cooking shows" (p. 89).
Gary delivers this short rant as he, Mark, and Kaitlyn clean up bodies in an abandoned law office. His frustrated outburst suggests that the forms of inequality that existed before the apocalypse will likely be repeated in whatever society emerges after. Worse still, the people who were tasked with the dangerous job of cleaning up Manhattan will not be rewarded for their labor. Of course, this does end up being the case as Manhattan is soon overrun with skels, but it nonetheless indicates that the problems of contemporary society–in this case inequality–would not innately be solved by the plague.
No one used the word "cure" anymore. The plague so transformed the human body that no one still believed they could be restored.
In the aftermath of the plague, rumors swirl that researchers are studying skels and working on vaccines. Some people are even so hopeful of this outcome that they chain their zombified family members up, waiting for the arrival of the vaccine. Yet as this passage makes clear, it is likely that no vaccine is forthcoming. Thus, rather than believing that the world–and the people in it–can be restored to the way they were before the pandemic, people should abandon this hope and think pragmatically about creating the world to come. It is a distressing image, one that should make readers happy that vaccines have been created for a great many real-life illnesses.
Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to the discrete and internal moment" (p. 62).
This quote appears in a passage describing the stragglers that the sweepers encounter while cleaning up Zone One. Frequently, the stragglers are found doing rote, mundane activities. Often, they're found doing the jobs they did before the plague converted them to skels. In this quote–as elsewhere in the novel–Whitehead suggests a continuity between life before and after the plague. Indeed, many of us are tasked with doing boring, repetitive jobs that we do as if on auto-pilot. It is a bleak image, but it is an integral part of Whitehead's critique of contemporary society.
"No one at Fort Wanton, man or woman, failed to experience an episode of cognitive dissonance on meeting Kaitlyn, being subjected to her buoyant giggle. But she had done the same things that all had been forced to do. She had been hunted, and she had escaped. She had killed and had watched as the cast of her anecdotes was cut down, her former fellow pledges and debate partners" (p. 59).
Kaitlyn is often portrayed in a negative light throughout the novel. She is a stickler for the rules and often disapproves of the actions of those around her. This passage, however, highlights just how resilient, and admirable she is. For anyone to survive this far into the plague, they would have had to do awful, traumatizing things. That Kaitlyn is still able to have a "buoyant giggle" is a testament to the strength of her will and spirit.
"He was a firm believer, in the absence of any traditionally recognized faith, or even nontraditional and gaining traction in these murderous days, in the reserve tank. It was important to maintain a reserve tank of feeling topped off in case of emergency. Mark was not going to spare any for these cubs" (p. 51).
This quote is found in the passage describing the Tromanhauser Triplets. Many of the characters feel an intense attachment to the twins, even the usually cruel No Mas. Mark, however, does not feel the same sense of attachment out of principle. Instead, he tries to reserve his ability to feel anything at all. This passage effectively explains the lack of closeness that Mark feels for those around him. At the same time the reference to a "case of emergency" foreshadows a situation in which he'll need to use that "reserve tank." Sure enough, one such emergency happens just two days later when Gary is bitten by the skel. In that instance, Mark finally grows close to Gary, just before his death. This saddening passage reveals the sort of isolation and fear of attachment that Mark had to endure.
"The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction" (p. 153).
This quote makes obvious a theme that runs through the novel: that contemporary society is flawed and that it has caused, and will continue to cause catastrophes into the future, even if those catastrophes are not quite a zombie plague. While it may be hyperbolic to argue that humans "deserved" the plague, it is nonetheless true that the current global economic system causes "brutalities" on a daily basis. In this way, Whitehead makes clear that while might be able to clearly picture the horrors of a post-apocalyptic world, they should also remain attentive to the horrors of the world we live in now. While the characters in the book did not avert the plague, there is still the possibility for change in our own world.
Mark didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure" (p. 160).
This quote appears after Mim tells her Last Night story to Mark, shortly after they meet in the toy store. Of particular importance is the sentence, "the plague had a knack for narrative closure." It foreshadows the fact that Zone One, a novel about the plague, lacks a sense of closure. It is never revealed if humans are able to overcome the plague, let alone if Mark and Kaitlyn escape Zone One safely. In this way, Whitehead is explicitly pushing back against the notion that a situation like the one he has been describing throughout the novel could be easily resolved. In a sense, the horrors of the plague are so extreme as to resist representation at all. This is just one instance in which Whitehead cleverly foreshadows and embeds veiled references to the characteristics of the novel itself.
"All over the country survivors formed ill-fated tribes that the dead inevitably tore to shreds. Desperate latecomers asked for asylum from those inside and were turned away at the barrel of a semiauto: This is our house. He'd slept in the dead trees and now here he was with this family.
This quote appears in the section of the novel when Mark is living in the farmhouse in Northampton, Massachusetts with Tad, Jerry, and Margie. It's an unusually upbeat passage–after Mark has roughed it on his own for weeks after the plague descends, he has finally settled into another family. As this passage suggests, adverse circumstances can lead to unlikely, yet powerful bonds such as the one that Mark experiences with his new family. At the same time, Whitehead again offers up subtle foreshadowing with the reference to "ill-fated tribes that the dead inevitably tore to shreds" (p. 222). Shortly after this quote appears, the farmhouse is attacked by skels and Jerry is killed.
"Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top of each other?" (p. 288.)
This passage occurs near the end of the novel after Gary has been bit by the sky. As he and Mark talk, it is revealed both that Mark is black and that his nickname has racial connotations because of "the black-people-can't-swim" stereotype" (p. 287). When Gary says that he wasn't familiar with this stereotype, Mark thinks that it was "unlikely that Gary was not in ownership of a master list of racial, gender and religious stereotypes, cross-indexed with corresponding punch lines as well as meta-textual dissection of those punch lines" (p. 288). While race is not a prominent element for much of the novel, here it is brought to the foreground, as Mark is prompted to consider if racism would continue in the new society. Unfortunately, he concludes that "if they could bring back paperwork... they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns" (p. 288). Through this statement–as elsewhere in the novel–Whitehead rejects the wishful notion that the plague would somehow lead to the creation of a better, more egalitarian society.
"Fuck it, he thought. You have to learn to swim sometime. He opened the door and walked into the sea of the dead" (p. 322).
These are the final lines of the novel, and it occurs after the skels have swarmed Zone One and Mark has returned to the fortune teller in an unsuccessful attempt to find Kaitlyn. This closing image references Mark's nickname and the reason it was given to him—that is, because he does not know how to swim. Just as Whitehead writes earlier in the novel that "the plague had a knack for narrative closure," he reveals this to be the case with the novel as a whole. Indeed, Mark's fate is left entirely unclear. An optimistic reader could find hope that the reference to learning to swim indicates a future for Mark. That is to say, learning to swim means that he does not drown. A more skeptical reader, however, could imagine Mark being swallowed up by "the sea of the dead" (p. 322). This inconclusive ending serves as a clever means of testing the reader's hope for the future of this fictional world. On a more formal level, the expletive at the beginning of the sentence indicates the informal tone taken by the narrator of the novel.
