New York City (Symbol)
New York City plays a prominent role in Zone One. It's not just the main setting of the novel's action–it's also a powerful symbol whose meaning changes throughout the novel. In the flashback scene at the beginning of the novel, Mark imagines New York as a "magnificent contraption" made "bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea" (p. 5). To Mark, the city represents the ingenuity and achievement of humankind, where a single person was just "a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock (p. 5). This rendering of the city is juxtaposed sharply against the city after the plague, a city that has been boarded up and emptied of people. After the plague, the city becomes a very different symbol: a symbol of human resilience and regeneration. As Lieutenant declares in a conversation with Mark, "if you can bring back New York City, you can bring back the world" (p. 121). At the conclusion of the novel, however, it is made clear that because New York could not be brought back, the prospect of human survival is dim.
The Wall (Symbol)
If New York City becomes a symbol of human hope and resilience after the plague, the wall around Zone One serves as a symbol for the divide between the humans and the skels. Lieutenant admits as much when he says "'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'" (p. 121). On the outside of the wall is the chaos of the skels and the plague, and within the wall is human order and civilization. In more figurative ways, characters try to create mental and emotional boundaries between themselves and the skels. Characters like No Mas and Gary treat the skels inhumanely in part to demonstrate that their not human and thus should be eliminated without remorse. Mark, however, believes otherwise. To him, the skels still possess human qualities to the extent that they frequently remind him of people he once knew. Thus, for Mark, the "wall" between humans and skels is not firm–the two cannot be entirely separated from one another. This is made clear at the end of the novel, when the physical wall around Zone One collapses and a torrent of skels flood into the now-compromised human domain.
The Casino (Symbol)
Throughout the novel, Whitehead lodges a number of critiques against contemporary society. At one point, the narrator says that "the human 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 scathing passage makes it clear that Whitehead is drawing a connection between contemporary human behavior and the subsequent plague. In particular, he critiques the kind of excesses and luxuries that perpetuate "the calculated brutalities of the global economic system" (p. 153).
These forms of greed and excess are symbolized by the casino at which Mark spends the final days before society collapses. Whitehead describes the experience of being in the casino in great detail–it is a place where "the machine trilled and dinged and whooped in a regional dialect of money" and where "the slots maintained their sturdy population of glass-eyed defectives, the protohumans with their sleepless claws (p. 81-82). Mark and his casino companion, Kyle, are described as compulsive gamblers whose "brains fogged over as possibility and failure enthralled them in a perpetual and tantalizing loop" (p. 82). They are so preoccupied with their gambling that they fail to check the news and thus do not realize that the world is effectively ending. In this sense, Whitehead is suggesting that we may also be too preoccupied with the casino of contemporary capitalism to realize the extent to which we are "poisoning the planet" (p. 153).
The Worthless Action Figures (Symbol)
Mark and Mim meet in a toy store, where they spend several months before Mim goes missing. The contents of the toy store are described, including the items that were once the "prized commodities" of the store's old owner (p. 243). Stored "behind locked glass cabinet," the long list of objects includes a "trove of Depression-era rag dolls, atomic-age ray guns and scale-model fighter jets, intricate military play sets of quaint lethality, and action figures of cameo characters who had been inserted into the sequel for the express purpose of action-figure production" (p. 244). Upon discovering these toys, Mark excitedly says "this stuff is really valuable" but Mim retorts "Where? to whom? For what? That's the old world" (p. 244).
These valuable yet worthless toys are symbolic of the way that value is assigned to objects. Indeed, in the present day, a whole range of objects have value just because they are rare and collectible. In an apocalyptic situation like the plague, however, this value is effectively nullified. While artworks, diamond jewelry, and mint-condition toys might be worth vast sums of money now, an apocalyptic plague would render worthless. In this context, objects with utility, like axes, ammunition, and juice boxes, suddenly become the most valuable commodities.
Photographs (Symbol)
Interestingly, Zone One both begins and ends with the description of photographs. In the first scene of the novel, Mark's family's trips to New York City are "preserved in a series of photographs taken by strangers" (p. 3). Mark's father's camera is described as being "so backward that every lurching specimen his father enlisted from the passerby was able to operate it sans hassle" (p. 4). In a flashback at the end of the novel, Mark meets a family at an abandoned hotel and they asked him to take a picture of them. The father explains that they "like to keep a record" (p. 319). After he takes their photos "they asked if they could take Mark Spitz's picture" (p. 320). It is unusual that this family would want "a record" of the horrors of the post-apocalyptic plague. It is even more unlikely that they will ever have a chance to have the photos developed. In this way, photographs in the novel are symbolic of a connection to the past–like the memories and flashbacks which recur throughout the novel–but also indicate a sense of hopefulness that things might one day improve to the extent that one would be able to look back, if not fondly, from a place of stability back to the days of the plague.
