Zombies: Fiction or Foreshadowing?

Of course, the first thing we think of when we hear "zombie apocalypse" is some sort of zombie fiction. Whether it's The Walking Dead, World War Z, or Alice in Zombieland, I think it's safe to say that most of us have read, watched, or heard of this genre. Zone One by Colson Whitehead is one of these works of fiction. It captures the post-apocalyptic haze after a virus that turns people into cannibals spreads throughout the country, and recounts the details of "Last Night," which is what people are calling the apocalyptic event itself.

Now, the first thing I did to get some ideas for how to start this particular post was type "zombie apocalypse" into my good ol' Chrome search engine. The first thing I found was that the Center for Disease Control has a page on zombie apocalypse, and has endorsed a book that gives you post-apocalyptic survival and preparedness tips, that can be found here.

This made me think about how zombie apocalypses are really just as scary and daunting as any other apocalypse, like the war in American War, or the plague in Station Eleven. In Zone One, Mark Spitz debates his life and his purpose after his whole world was swept away. He was sent out with team Omega to sweep the grounds of Zone One and eliminate any remaining stragglers so that colonization can continue. Throughout the novel, he debates what he's doing with his life, but near the end, he gives a sick smile as his gang is being overcome by a horde of stragglers and skels, and it seems as though he finds his true purpose in taking down the means by which everyone he knew and loved died.

There was a lot of moral debate between whether to kill the stragglers or let them live. I just want to say this: why would you let the host of the virus stick around and infect more people? To give some background, the stragglers were the zombies that didn't go into a whole human-eating aggressive rampage; they just returned to what seemed to be their main purpose in life or doing the task that they deemed most important in death. For example, Ned the Copy Boy in the office building team Omega swept was stuck forever making copies, or replacing the toner, frozen without ability to move. This gave rise to the game that was probably a survivor coping mechanism: "Solve the Straggler."

There's also one last point to mention: in the last pages of Zone One, the author reveals that Mark Spitz was of African American race. Does this placement say anything about the author's feelings about race, or a message Whitehead was trying to convey? Throughout the whole novel, I thought Spitz was white, just because I had to look up his name to see who he was even named after (I am no expert on famous swimmers, a biography here). It didn't make me see his actions throughout the novel any differently, though. Perhaps this is the author's way of saying that, when it comes down to it, race (and likely gender and class) all mix together in the realm of forgotten things when a disaster of this magnitude occurs.