How Station Eleven Mirrors Our Hope And Moving Forward After COVID-19

What I found most surprising with Station Eleven was how uplifting it was. This book is not really an “end of the world” story, or at least, not only an end of the world story. Even though their way of life ends, as Clark puts it, they “have seen one world end and another begin” (Mandel 331). There are so many ways that this book shows how resilient people are, while some may take advantage of this situation, so many more will turn to kindness and hold onto our humanity, as we see with the development of the Museum of Civilization and the Travelling Symphony. Even in the midst of all of this turmoil and tragedy, there is still so much beauty to be found in the world, and that feels like the most important part of the book, and the thing one should take away from reading this.

We move through about five perspectives in the novel; Jeevan, Arthur, Kirsten, Clark, and Miranda, and while they don’t get equal time, I don’t think it lessens the importance of their experience. Miranda and Arthur don’t make it to post-flu, but their presence is felt long after they’ve gone, both in their relationships with others and in the things they made. Jeevan, Kirsten, and Clark show us the ways humanity moved on after the pandemic, and especially with Jeevan and Clark, who were adults when the flu swept through, it shows how much more fulfilling their lives were after the flu than before it. Jeevan discovered he wanted to help people, and became a doctor of sorts, while Clark collected relics from the past and built the Museum. While our own COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t quite on the same scale as the Georgia Flu pandemic in the novel, our reactions somewhat mirror the other. People turned to each other instead of away, pushing to stay connected even when we had to quarantine, and being kind and understanding of one another as we move forward and past the pandemic. While it may feel callous to look on the bright side following a world-ending event such as the Georgia flu pandemic, with so many who lost loved ones to the virus, life didn’t end, the world continued to spin and people had to find a way to move forward, and I think evolving in this way is not only more accurate to human experience, but much better than the alternative.

What is so great about the novel is that it’s not a survival type of book; it’s not a gritty “kill or be killed” post apocalyptic story that glorifies gun violence and madness, but seeks to truly capture the human experience. There is murder, and gun violence and madness, but the author and the characters in it take great pains to make it so that it is not the norm. One part that strikes me is that it wasn’t always this way, though. In the scene when Kirsten and August meet Finn and his twins on their search for the Symphony. When they first meet, while Finn is armed, he doesn’t have the weapon trained on them when they arrive; “this was the pleasure of being alive in Year Twenty, this calmer age. For the first ten or twelve years...he would have been...more likely to shoot” (Mandel 145). This to me marks a decrease not just in violence, but desperation. People aren’t clinging to the past, but are moving forward and looking toward the future, which allows them to see that senseless violence isn’t the answer. The characters we follow through the story aren’t the only ones who are looking toward the future. Near the end of the novel, Clark shows Kirsten that there is an entire village that has been able to harness electricity (Mandel 311). Even Diallo, who we only see in the interview he did with Kirsten, is actively making something, not just records of the past, but an actual newspaper that covers what’s going on around them.

This book shows a lot of death, not just of people but of life as we knew it. It would have been easy to turn this story into a survival of the fittest, trimming away life’s beauty and focusing on surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, but Mandel doesn’t do that. In fact, she shows how that line of thinking isn’t really possible, at least not for the long-term. Mandel shows how much humanity needs art, both in the Travelling Symphony and in the Museum of Civilization, but she also shows it in marveling at the things we take for granted. Clark has a moment like this when the first pilot takes off toward Los Angeles, asking himself why, in his life of traveling, he had never noticed the beauty of flight (Mandel 247). But I don’t think Mandel wanted the characters, or us, to despair over what was lost, but to marvel at what humans can accomplish in the face of loss and tragedy.