To be Raised in Chaos

The first thing the general public seems to think about in the midst of an apocalypse is, "what about the children?" Who's going to take care of them, how can they be raised in a world like this, and should we really worry about repopulating in a time like this? This is a strong underlying theme in the novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

We have seen this theme elsewhere in apocalyptic fiction - Carl and the baby in The Walking Dead, little Prim in The Hunger Games, and now Tyler and Kirsten in Station Eleven. That's the question I'm addressing today: how can they be raised in a world like this?

While the present day isn't all fields of flowers, it's certainly better than the setting of Mendel's book, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where only around a few hundred people survived a deadly, SARS-like plague. We first see Kirsten, a child who witnessed death before the pandemic even began. We then see Tyler, the young child of the man whom Kirsten saw die, and we subtly watch them grow up in an apocalypse.

Kirsten keeps tattoos of daggers on her wrist for each of the people she has killed in her life. This alone sets the theme for her story - she is a fighter. She killed a human for the first time when she was fifteen and traveling with the Symphony. She had gotten good at throwing knives already, and stuck one right in the neck of a man who was trying to hurt her. She believes there can be no explanation for how calm she was after killing that man - she wiped the blood off of her knife and moved on with her life.

While this is arguably different than the way Tyler Leander grew up as a child, Tyler's life was a little more sedentary. He wasn't forced to kill; he was taken by his mother, Elizabeth, to Israel to live, and when they returned to the Americas, the pandemic struck. He was raised in an airport by his mother, a conservative religious type. In a notable scene, Tyler was seen reading to the dead that were quarantined in one of the airplanes, out of the Book of Revelation. Some time later, Tyler is then taken away by his mother to follow a religious cult; he then grows up to lead a group of religious extremists, naming himself "The Prophet" and speaking of the divine reasons for the pandemic.

So what made these two grow up so differently? Obviously, Tyler grew up and was influenced by his incredibly religious mother, and was taken with these religious people, but is that all that had to happen for him to become the leader of extremists who murder in the name of religion? All of these events occurred in the young years when a child is most impressionable (read about it here), In my opinion, it was just the way they were bred. Kirsten had it in her genes to be a rock-hard fighter, and Tyler was too impressionable to form his own thoughts about the world, and therefore stuck to doing what he was told. Either way you look at it, it's a delicate type of environment to grow up in - it can either build you up, or break you.