INSIDE

STORIES
VATE Inside Stories 2019
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Teaching notes prepared by Marion White

VICTORIAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

 VICTORIAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

VATE Inside Stories 2019

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel

Teaching notes prepared by Marion White

Edited by Josephine Smith

Cover design by Viveka de Costa

Formatted by Josephine Smith

© VATE 2018
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Station Eleven
Teaching notes prepared by Marion White
Introduction
What if a terrible flu virus were to kill most of the people
on our planet? Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven
is ‘speculative fiction’, but Mandel herself has said the novel
is a ‘love letter to the world that we live in’ (Michel, 2014).
She thinks that if there were a doomsday event, there may
initially be a period of chaotic social collapse, but gradually
the surviving people would organise themselves into
communities akin to our contemporary civil society. Mandel
worries that the civilisation we take for granted is fragile and
vulnerable, and ‘could fail quite easily’, but she harbours ‘a
possibly naïve but stubborn notion that the overwhelming
majority of people on earth really just want to live peacefully
and raise their kids and go about their business with a
minimum of fear and insecurity.’ (McCarry, 2014).
Station Eleven is more a tribute to contemporary civil society
than a realistic portrayal of a post-apocalyptic society.
Mandel’s evocative literary language often brings alive the
beauty of ‘this dazzling world’ (p. 296), while her central
thematic ideas of truth, hope, love and moral courage
leave readers with something positive rather than negative.
The characters are more often inspired by art, knowledge
and concern for others than by fear, superficial ideas,
authoritarianism or self-interest. The novel values: trusting
rather than controlling others; connecting with and paying
attention to each other rather than pursuing the illusory
thrills of self-promotion and fame; and above all, creating
rather than destroying.
Pivotal in the novel’s network of characters is the celebrity
actor Arthur Leander, while the ‘Georgia Flu’ provides
the pivotal moment of world-wide ‘collapse’ in a narrative
timeline which, although presented non-chronologically,
spans five decades. Arthur is performing as King Lear in
Toronto’s Elgin Theatre when he—and within days the
whole society—collapses. After this apocalypse, we follow
Kirsten and her companions in the Travelling Symphony,
Clark who becomes a museum curator in the airport lounge,
and Jeevan the paramedic who eventually lives with his
family in a community in Virginia. Readers gradually build
a picture of the three decades preceding the apocalypse, as
well as the two decades after it, piecing together as the narrative
takes us back and forward in time the network of relationships
among Arthur, his first wife Miranda, his other wives, his friend
Clark, his putative rescuer and erstwhile paparazzo Jeevan, and
his son’s future nemesis, the young Kirsten.
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
The non-chronological structure of the novel may seem
disjointed at first, but students may warm to the game of
tracking items, characters and events that are re-visited
throughout the novel, and may even enjoy the way all the
puzzle pieces fall into place by the end (note: reading this
guide is a ‘spoiler’). This repetitive revisiting of past events
reflects how memory and nostalgia operate in our lives: the
present and the past increasingly become blended rather
than sequenced. Readers of Station Eleven are privy to
the recursive memory processes experienced by the main
characters.
Although speculative fiction is set in an imaginary future,
it is embedded in the views and values of its own time.
Milner (2012) notes that dystopian fiction was ‘at its
most influential in Europe during the first half of the
20th century’, but has ‘once again become fashionable…
almost certainly because we too now have much to be
warned against.’ When Mandel’s characters yearn for the
science and technologies they have lost, or say they never
want to see war again—and particularly when they come
across a violent, polygamous, authoritarian cult leader—
we understand that the novel reflects anxiety about our
own time rather than the future. However, a future post-
apocalyptic dystopia enables the author to explore questions
of survival, ethics, morality, and the common good. Fear,
loneliness and despair can be the experiences of those few
people who survive, while the threat of attack or starvation
can cause people to become wary, judgmental and violent.
On the other hand, there are people who, even under threat,
will stand up for what is true, good, awe-inspiring, and
morally right.
Mandel’s novel also reveals that although binary opposites
such as permanence and impermanence, good and evil,
or fragility and strength may be interesting, we need
to consider ambiguities and paradoxes when it comes
to questions of values. For instance, media can be both
informative and exploitative, our natural environment is
both fragile and necessarily permanent, works of art can be
both ephemeral and enduring, and people can be physically
strong yet morally weak.
Perhaps most pertinent in our present time is the idea in
Mandel’s novel that people are deluded if they imagine a
tyrannical, charismatic strongman can be a good leader.
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Ways into the text
• Research the flu pandemic of 1918–1919. How
many people died; which countries were affected?
Katherine Ann Porter’s 1939 novella Pale Horse,
Pale Rider is set in that time; what does it have in
common with Station Eleven?
• Read and consider John Donne’s meditation XVII,
No Man is an Island. After noting the frequency of
island images in Mandel’s novel, discuss this poem
again.
• Students may have read post-apocalyptic science
fiction such as When the Wind Blows by Raymond
Briggs (1982) or Z for Zachariah by Robert
O’Brien (1974), as numerous texts for young
adults have appeared since nuclear war became a
threat. Students could present to the class other
speculative and apocalyptic fiction texts they
know, such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury,
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick,
The Road by Cormac McCarthy or the novels
of Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, or Kurt
Vonnegut. On the Beach, by Nevil Shute is a well-
known Australian novel (and film) in this genre.
• Students should study maps of Canada, particularly
of the Great Lakes area in relation to eastern
Canada and the northern states of the USA. They
will find it helpful to know about Yonge Street,
which runs north-south in Toronto, and landmarks
such as the CN tower and the Elgin Theatre, about
the orientation of the lakes and their shorelines,
and that Denman (Delano) Island is located on
the west coast near Vancouver. A virtual tour of
Toronto’s Elgin Theatre is available at the Ontario
Heritage Trust website. After reading the text, they
could find the Travelling Symphony’s route from
Traverse City to Kincardine to Algonac (p. 37) in
Year Twenty, and discuss where Severn airport with
its Museum of Civilisation is located (see Reader’s
Guide, Michigan).
• Read the graphic (and YouTube) forms of Bill
Watterson’s cartoons, Calvin and Hobbes. Why
would Miranda and Victoria like these comic
characters? Miranda is inspired in part by the
character Spaceman Spiff (p. 88). After reading
Station Eleven, discuss the concept of the alter ego
in relation to Miranda and her graphic art.
6
• Watch episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, the first Star
Trek TV series with a female captain (YouTube lists
some favourites). The episode ‘Survival Instinct’
is referenced in the novel. It was written by Ron
Moore, and has the female leader Seven of Nine
and the Borg.
• Research the Comet Hyakutake. As they read
the novel, students should keep notes on other
recurring motifs: the paperweight that Clark
bought in Rome; the tattoos on Kirsten’s wrist
and Finn’s cheek; the starship Enterprise; gossip
magazines with pictures of Arthur’s wives; the
copies of Miranda’s comics, Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No.
1: Station Eleven, and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2:
The Pursuit.
• Research and discuss the concept of ‘civilisation’.
What did Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935)
say about civilisation and taxes; what did he mean?
Derived from the Latin word for citizen, civis, what
values are connoted by words such as ‘civil’ and
‘civilisation’?
• Discuss the main ideas in Shakespeare’s King
Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure or
Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the role and impact
of the archetypal stories presented in these plays
and in opera and dance—stories about love and
death, trust, loyalty and betrayal, freedom, justice
and oppression, and the meaning of life. Why
do we value plays, operas and musicals? Why
do people love the music of Bach or Vivaldi, the
symphonies of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky? After
reading the novel, discuss why Kirsten believes that
mere survival is insufficient.
• Read the poem Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the
Dancers by William Butler Yeats, and view Henri
Matisse’s ‘Dance’ paintings. Mandel uses the line
‘love is like the lion’s tooth’; what could it mean?
• Students could imagine that they, with family and
friends, are the only survivors in Australia after a
pandemic carries off everyone else. First, they make
their own ‘secret list of everything that was good’
(p. 327)—what things about your previous life
will you miss most?—then, decide how to organise
so that everyone can live safely and survive. This
could be the beginning of a plan for students’ own
post-apocalyptic short stories.
 VAT E Inside Stories 2019

Structure of the text

Mandel’s non-chronological narrative pivots around the
moment of Arthur’s (and the world’s) collapse. Whilst the
narrative point of view is generally omniscient, or third-
person, readers frequently have access to the thoughts of a
character—Miranda, Clark, Jeevan or Kirsten. The reader
becomes aware, after a while, that the non-linear recursive
structure reflects the nature of memory. By the end of the
novel, we have looped back over the events of thirty years
and forward as far as Year Twenty so many times that we,
like the characters, are located in all time-zones at once,
and carry all their memories with us to the end. For
instance, as we frequently revisit Arthur and Miranda’s
dinner party (twelve years prior to the pandemic),
sometimes in Clark’s head and other times in Miranda’s or
Jeevan’s, we become familiar with the dinner party from
different perspectives—our ‘memory’ of it is built up in a
layered way throughout the novel. Or the moment fifteen
years before the collapse, when Miranda dines with Arthur
and is photographed by paparazzo Jeevan—readers see this
event from both Miranda’s and Jeevan’s point of view.
Students may initially find the structure confusing;
suggesting that they re-arrange its sections into a linear
narrative may help. Below is a very simplified outline of the
chapter structure in the novel, but the novel could also be
charted by chronology. Students could construct, prior to
reading the novel, their own chart in which to take notes
about significant events, characters or motifs, structuring
it around the year of collapse. This could be done by using
a table like the one below, but with ‘Year’ heading the first
column, and ‘Significant events, characters, etc’ heading the
second. Students should note, prior to Year Zero: Years 30,
~20, 15, 12, 10, 7, 1, one month before and two weeks before.
After Year Zero, they might arrange their notes in days, then in
Years 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 15, 18, 19 and finally Year 20.

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Section title Chapters within each section

1. Arthur, 51, dies in Act IV King Lear. Jeevan meets Kirsten, 7, is happy he tried to save Arthur.
2. Elizabeth and Tyler, 7, are in Jerusalem. Tanya gives paperweight to Kirsten.
The Theatre 3. Jeevan hears about Georgia Flu, stocks up, goes to his brother Frank.
4. Arthur’s lawyer calls Arthur’s closest friend Clark.
5. Clark phones Miranda who’s in Malaysia looking at ships moored offshore.
6. A list of what will disappear after the apocalypse: ‘No more…’

7. Year 20, Travelling Symphony on its way to St. Deborah by the Water. Kirsten has two Dr.
Eleven magazines, Station Eleven and The Pursuit. She and August raid houses for useful things.
8. Vol. 1 No. 1 and 2, Dr. Eleven ‘tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth’.
9. No audience for Vivaldi, they’ll do the Dream. Charlie and sixth guitar were here two years ago.
A Midsummer
Kirsten no longer with Sayid. Dieter is older, Alexandra younger.
Night’s Dream
10. Kirsten looks for Charlie and Jeremy but they left a year ago, with baby Annabel.
11. Plague, pestilence, contagion, Shakespeare and death, ‘survival is insufficient’.
12. The prophet, his words, doomsday cult, permission to leave. He wants Alexandra. The
Symphony decide to go south towards Severn City, east side of Lake Michigan.

13. Arthur, 36, met Miranda for dinner seven years ago, now she is moving in with him.
14. Miranda likes working at Neptune Logistics, but is bored with Pablo. She has dinner with
Arthur and will move in with him. Victoria likes Calvin and Hobbes comics.
15. The dinner party in Los Angeles, ten people including Gary Heller, Elizabeth, Clark. Miranda,
now 27, feels marooned, talks outside with Jeevan, sees Arthur’s letter to V., is creating Station
I prefer you
Eleven, sits with Elizabeth at end of party. After divorce, she will study in Toronto, live and
with a crown
breathe her work, and be lonely travelling.
16. Interview transcript. Year 15 François Diallo interviews Kirsten. Arthur gave her the comics.
17. Arthur and Clark meet in London for dinner.
18. Interview. Kirsten talks about the TS travelling south, contrasts illogical cults with towns that
have elected mayors and are prepared to discuss the past (p. 115).

19. St. Deborah by the Water, TS leaves to avoid the prophet. Eleanor, 12, a stowaway says Charlie
and Jeremy went to Museum of Civilisation. Symphony travels towards Severn City.
20. Jackson and Viola go with Kirsten and August to check a burnt-out school.
21. Interview. Kirsten was eight, won’t speak about the two knives.
22. Kirsten now lives in Dieter’s tent. On August and Kirsten’s watch, Dieter and Sayid disappear.
The Starship
23. Kirsten and August catch fish but lose Symphony. Three days from Museum of Civilisation.
24. Finn has a t on his cheek. Why has the Symphony changed route? In an untouched house,
August finds a Starship Enterprise, Kirsten looks for Dr. Eleven or Dear V.
25. Arthur’s letters to Victoria; he remembers the island and the Comet Hyakutake.
26. Elizabeth calls to tell Clark about Dear V. Clark realises he lacks joy, awe, inspiration.

27. Jeevan promises now-famous Arthur, 44, he won’t reveal news about Lydia for 24 hours.
28. Frank’s apartment eight days after collapse, Jeevan remembering.
29. Jeevan still ‘feels bad about’ his photo of Miranda, but proud of keeping his word to Arthur.
Toronto
30. Frank is ghostwriting a philanthropist’s memoir; the brothers observe collapse.
31. Diallo repents asking Kirsten about knives. She remembers Arthur’s fall, wonders who was the
guy who administered CPR.

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32. Jeevan thinks, Day 47, they might have to leave the apartment.
33. Interview. Kirsten remembers: Jeevan with her when Arthur collapsed; receiving the
paperweight; being with her 15 year old brother Peter after parents ‘disappeared’.
34. Day 58, Frank reads to Jeevan about celebrity, people’s need to be seen and remembered.
Toronto
35. Interview. Kirsten and Peter walked east and south to the USA in Year 0.
36. Jeevan followed the Lake when he left Toronto Year 0, fearful of no electric light and of people
with guns, saw Toronto from the other shore.
37. Interview. Kirsten remembers looking out a plane window at New York ‘a sea of electric lights’.

38. Kirsten, August find gossip magazines in house and realise Finn’s scar was an airplane.
39. Miranda meets Arthur in his dressing room where young Kirsten is colouring-in, gives Arthur
Station Eleven and The Pursuit; she is more interested now in the Undersea than in Dr. Eleven.
She couriers the paperweight with note to ‘the Elgin Theatre’.
The Airplanes
40. Miranda on beach looking at ships moored off Singapore harbour, Clark phones from NY to tell
her Arthur died. Heller called Clark from LA. Clark, Elizabeth and Tyler board the plane out of
NY, but they only get to Michigan, Severn City airport.
41. Miranda is sick in Malaysia hotel, walks to the beach, watches sunrise, remembers.

42. Clark’s years at Severn airport’s Concourse, memories of Robert, concern for people.
43. Early days in Severn airport. Elizabeth is deranged, Tyler reading comics and Bible.
44. Year Fifteen, Clark in Museum. Elizabeth and Tyler went with religious people in Year Two,
Tyler reading Revelations. Petoskey newspapers are brought to the airport museum.
The Terminal 45. Year Fifteen, Diallo interviews all Travelling Symphony in New Petoskey, goes with Kirsten to
hear Beethoven.
46. Year Fifteen in Virginia, Jeevan is now the paramedic everyone turns to. With wife and friends,
he enjoys simple living, hasn’t heard of the prophet who shoots non-compliant women.
47. Clark, 70 in Year Nineteen, is stunned to realise who the prophet is and we realise the prophet is
‘from here’. Charlie and Jeremy walk in to the terminal with baby Annabel.

48. Kirsten and August, in Severn City, on the lake but still separated from TS, see Sayid. They kill
the prophet’s men in self-defense; prophet wants Eleanor for his fifth wife.
49. The clarinet escapes from prophet’s men, persuades the Travelling Symphony to change course.
The play she had begun writing is mistaken for a suicide note but actually she’s been seized by
the prophet’s men; she escapes but Sayid remains.
50. Kirsten’s two knife tattoos on her wrist will become four; she feels ‘the shock of being alive’.
The Prophet She and August find a New Testament in prophet’s bag, and the torn page of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1
No. 1: Station Eleven. She leaves the page in Tyler’s hand, ‘I have walked all my life through this
tarnished world’ and a reference to ‘the road’.
51. Luli follows them to the airport; two sentries meet them, one is Charlie. In the tent, Kirsten re-
united with her friend Charlie.
52. As Kirsten looks through the telescope at a town with electricity, Jeevan and family enjoy the
fleeting moments of simple living.

53. Arthur’s last day. He no longer wants things, only his son; he gives the paperweight to Tanya,
the comics to Kirsten, phones Tyler who has the other set of comics, and dies with just his
memories.
54. Miranda remembers her image of Dr. Eleven visited by the ghost of Captain Lonagan.
Station Eleven
55. The Travelling Symphony stays at Severn airport for five weeks, performing Shakespeare and
music. Kirsten gives Clark one of the Dr. Eleven comics and promises to return to lend him the
other. Clark reads it, recognises a dinner party that he remembers, and thinks of ships ‘moving
over the water, towards another world just out of sight.’

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V A T E Inside Stories 2019
Perspective on the text
Emily St. John Mandel’s novel invites readers, not so much
to fear doomsday and its dystopian aftermath, as to think
about what we truly value in the society we currently
inhabit. Each of Mandel’s main characters represents the
good in humanity; each of them is engaged in work that
either cares for others and builds community or creates art
that shows ‘the best of the world’. Kirsten, Clark, Miranda,
Jeevan, even Arthur, each is honest, creative, and selfless yet
strong, even though they are also—being human—flawed in
some way.
It is one of Shakespeare’s famously flawed characters who
opens the novel: ‘The king stood in a pool of blue light,
unmoored.’ King Lear has declined into madness by Act IV,
having ‘lost’ a child through his own self-focused short-
sightedness, while Arthur—who is playing the part and
has also ‘lost’ a child (not to mention a career and a few
wives) through the inevitable hubris of fame—is about to
die, and regrets everything about his life, just like Lear.
The assonance and the word ‘unmoored’ evoke not only a
sense of the chaos that’s about to ensue, but also the ships
and sea in a broken world that are thematic motifs in the
novel. To what extent do actors ‘become’ the characters they
inhabit, we might wonder; it’s a pertinent question again
when the prophet refers to Kirsten as ‘Titania’ (p. 300). Like
the strong, assertive character she plays in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, who refuses to give up the changeling boy
to Oberon, Kirsten and the Symphony shelter Eleanor and
refuse to give up Alexandra to the prophet. In King Lear,
Lear mirrors his friend Gloucester’s blindness; they are
both blind to the treachery and malice of the children they
mistakenly thought loving, as they are to the true loving-
kindness of the children they had rejected. Arthur dies
without knowing how treacherous and abusive his son will
become, or how creative and assertive his young co-actor
‘Kiki’ will become; his friend Clark bestows fatherly care
and guidance upon Kirsten instead.
Dualities and parallels abound in the novel, but Mandel
complicates apparent binary opposites, just as Shakespeare
and other poets do: ‘The bright side of the planet moves
towards darkness’ (Milosz). Dr. Eleven’s enemies in the
Undersea are (thinks Tyler) ‘not really bad … they just want
to go home’ (p. 325), and the prophet, although plainly the
baddie of the novel, was once (thinks Kirsten) ‘a boy adrift
on the road’ (p. 303). It is this more complicated view of
the human condition that Miranda embraces when she finds
that she is just as interested in her Undersea characters as
she is in Dr. Eleven. Miranda’s graphic representations of
Dr. Eleven and his ‘broken…little planet’, the space station,
mirror the devastated world of the post-pandemic novel.
10
In Miranda’s prophetic work of art, Station Eleven where
‘people [live] out their lives in underwater fallout shelters,
clinging to the hope that the world they remembered
could be restored’ (p. 213), is remarkably like the novel’s
‘Civilisation in Year Twenty [that is] an archipelago of small
towns’ (p. 48).
Miranda’s graphics in Dr. Eleven also reflect the sense of
loss experienced by people who are dislocated and far from
home, and the peace and calm of the Neptune Logistics
office overlooking the lake where she works, and the lights
of ships on a ‘dark sea’. Art, literature and drama often
reflect the life of the creator; similarly, readers/viewers
may reflect on their own lives as they consider the moral
dilemmas or big ideas presented in writing or performed
on stage. And the actors or musicians who perform often
find themselves increasingly undifferentiated from the
artwork: ‘Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of
borders between performance and life?’ Miranda thinks (p.
211)—for her too the borders between herself and her art
are blurred. She, like Dr. Eleven, is a person who cannot
go home, so the best she can do is choose how to live in
whatever place she finds herself.
That place is North America. Its geographical features
are important in the novel, especially Toronto, to which
characters return as if it’s home. Arthur says it’s the only
place he ever ‘felt free’ (p. 223), and Miranda loves the
view of the lake through her office window. Mandel
celebrates contemporary Western society in general, with
the suggestion that Western civilisation’s achievements—
its plays, comics, poetry, film, music and scientific
achievements—are enduring, deserving of permanence. She
also implicitly celebrates the bureaucratic infrastructure of
civil society, as well as the physical infrastructure of urban
spaces, although she is anxious about their fragility. Civil
society and democracy require focus, understanding, and
work to keep them viable; we should not take them for
granted, her novel suggests.
Paradoxically, the Travelling Symphony artists work to create
ephemeral performances so that the performing arts will
endure. A play or a performance of classical music requires
focus, knowledge and work to keep it ‘alive’. In order to
produce fleeting moments of ‘transcendent beauty and joy’,
despite all the difficulties of living and travelling together,
the Symphony must remain a ‘permanent company, [on]
permanent tour’. Miranda, too, thinks of her art as enduring
and reliable while she herself is mobile and lonely: she
‘thinks…Station Eleven will be my constant’ (p. 89). Diallo
understands how important it is to know the past in order
to maintain a civil society; he believes in his newspaper as a
means to connect people in all the separate towns, and he

believes ‘in understanding history’ (p. 115). The viability
and survival of the arts, and of historical records, is as much
a concern of Mandel’s novel as the question of human
survival.
Mandel lists in the chapter ‘No more…’ many of the things
we would miss if we found ourselves in a post-apocalypse
dystopia, and throughout the novel she describes simple,
everyday aspects of life in writing that is sensual in its
nostalgia:
the scratching of the little girl’s pencils… the
steam rings… the pleasant heat of the tea,
the warmth and beauty of these rooms: these
were the things Miranda remembered in the
last few hours… when she was drifting in
and out of delirium on a beach in Malaysia
(p. 215).
But through the device of setting her story a thousand
years in the future, the author also conveys a dim view
of our time/society: the self-centred individualism; the
empty managerial language; the venal paparazzi who feed
a voyeuristic population with pictures of the rich and
famous; the weight of money and possessions on those rich
enough to be famous; and above all, the violence. When
Frank, confined to a wheelchair after fighting in the Middle
East, says to Jeevan, ‘I spent a lot of time thinking about
civilization…I never want to see a war zone again’ (p. 183),
we understand Mandel’s views about contemporary wars in
the Middle East. When Jeevan is fearful about people with
guns, and when Kirsten hopes that younger colleagues will
not have to kill as she has, we understand her views about
this aspect of American culture. When characters yearn for
the science and technologies they have lost, or when the
author provides an extremely unsympathetic portrayal of a
violent, polygamous, authoritarian tyrant, we understand
that her dystopia is as much about our time as about the
future.
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
Characters
Arthur Leander grew up on Delano Island near Vancouver,
as did Miranda and Victoria, where there was a lake so
deep that divers couldn’t reach the bottom. He moved to
Toronto to study acting, where he met Clark. He becomes
successful as a film actor, lives in New York and Los Angeles.
He’s 29 and famous when he meets up with 17-year-old
Miranda. Seven years later they marry, after three years they
divorce; he marries Elizabeth and they have a son, Tyler.
His third wife is Lydia. Now ‘warped’ by celebrity, Arthur
admits—while telling Miranda about the publication Dear
V—that he used his childhood friend Victoria ‘as a diary’;
the letters, though, reveal a boy who loved the island and
the sea, who worked hard for his success, and who now lacks
a real sense of self: ‘life resembles a movie’. One year prior
to the pandemic, when they dine together in London, Clark
feels disgusted at the way Arthur seems, even with his best
friend, to be ‘performing for an audience’. However, just
prior to his death at 51—playing the role of Lear because
his celebrity status and his personal life are in decline—his
attitudes seem less superficial. He wants only his son, he
wants to give away all possessions, and he wants to pay
Tanya’s college fees.
Dr Clark Thompson, tall, British, and elegant in vintage
suits and pink socks, has been Arthur’s best friend since
they met in acting school. He returned to London to do a
PhD, then became a management consultant conducting
executive assessments. At the dinner party in Los Angeles,
he brings the paperweight from Rome as a present for
Miranda and Arthur (p. 93). A year prior to the pandemic,
in London, Clark dislikes the way Arthur is ‘having dinner
with an audience’; nevertheless he remembers Arthur two
decades later as beautiful and kind, and remembers how he
loved Toronto (p. 223). On the flight from New York to
Arthur’s funeral, Clark initially doesn’t know the Georgia
Flu is shutting everything down, because he doesn’t do
social media. He lands at Severn City Michigan instead
of Toronto, along with Elizabeth and Tyler. He remains
living in the airport for twenty years, at first remembering
and having ‘imaginary conversations’ with his erstwhile
boyfriend, Robert, a curator (p. 239), but later becoming a
museum curator himself, spending his days in his Museum
of Civilisation. An optimistic and self-disciplined man,
he trains himself to think positive thoughts, if not of the
future then by remembering the past; he shaves to avoid
‘the appearance of derelection’, and he is helpful to others in
the airport who are ‘terrified and weeping’. In fact, he feels
affection for most people. At 70, with his head shaved, rings
in his ears, and wearing a beautiful scarf, he has the wisdom
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V A T E Inside Stories 2019
of age, of prior knowledge and of learning. Reflecting on
‘the human enterprise each object’ requires, he sees all
objects as beautiful, he ‘weeps at the beauty of flight’, and
when in the twentieth year he detects Kirsten’s interest in
electricity, he takes her to the control tower to view the
place in the south where there are lights—as perhaps a
father would.
Miranda Carroll goes to Art School and does temp work
with Leon Prevant who’s in shipping. She leaves Pablo, an
artist who is abusive, then marries Arthur with whom she
has three years in Los Angeles where her only friend is Luli
the Pomeranian. Four months after their third-anniversary
dinner party, she is divorced. She studies Commerce in
Toronto, then resumes working (and travelling) for Leon
at Neptune Logistics in Client Relations. She has always
liked the big glass office where she has enough time to work
on her graphic novels, the work which is so important to
her that she doesn’t care whether it is published or not. She
is now far more self-assured than was the young Miranda
whom Jeevan first photographed as she stumbled out of
her first meeting with Arthur. When Arthur calls again two
weeks before the collapse, she agrees to meet—his father
has died. (Her dog Luli has just died too, the dog for whom
Dr Eleven’s dog is named, as is Tyler’s dog, the one Kirsten
adopts after Tyler dies.) Miranda flies from New York to
Toronto, where she sees Arthur in his dressing-room, gives
him a copy of each of the Dr. Eleven comics, and is angry
about the publication Dear V. Two weeks later on the beach
in Malaysia, Clark phones her about Arthur’s death; she
feels she is ‘walking underwater or in a dream’, she is more
interested now in the Undersea than in Dr. Eleven, and she
looks at the container ships ‘suspended’ between sky and
water in the sunrise. Does she die on the beach in Malaysia?
To complicate this enigma, the ghost of Captain Lonagan
says to Dr. Eleven, in the graphic Miranda remembers, that
death ‘is like waking from a dream’: ‘this was the image
she kept thinking of… the captain is rendered in delicate
watercolours, a translucent silhouette in the dim light of Dr.
Eleven’s office…’ (p. 330).
[Dr. Eleven is the main character, not in Mandel’s novel
but in Miranda’s graphic novel-within-the-novel. In some
ways this fictional physicist resembles his creator. He and
his colleagues escaped a hostile civilisation on Earth to live
on the dark planet Station Eleven, where there has been
a schism, and the people who long to go home live in the
Undersea. His mentor Captain Lonagan says ‘You should
try to understand them. All they want is to see sunlight
again’ (p. 83). As Tyler puts it to Arthur: in the water
around the islands where Dr. Eleven and his people live, are
12
the big seahorses who are not really enemies (reminding us
perhaps of the big container ships that look ‘otherworldly’
to the fishermen). Dr. Eleven finds himself longing, like the
people of the Undersea, for the planet he has left, and trying
‘to forget the sweetness of life on Earth’ (p. 105). The people
of the Undersea (like the Travelling Symphony and others)
cling ‘to the hope that the world they remembered could be
restored’ (p. 213). When Clark recognises the Los Angeles
dinner party in Miranda’s depiction of a dinner party on
Station Eleven, he notices that Dr. Eleven sits in the chair
where, in Clark’s memory, Miranda sat (p. 332).]
Jeevan Chaudry took photos for tabloid newspapers of
Arthur and his wives. He told Miranda he lives on the
photography, but lives for ‘truth and beauty’—he ‘felt bad
about’ the ‘unflattering shot’ he took of her (p. 175). He
becomes a paramedic because he wants ‘to do something
that matters’. He feels happy after performing CPR on
Arthur at the Elgin. In that year he is caring for his brother
in Frank’s Toronto apartment. Hearing about the pandemic,
he stores up food for them both, but many days later leaves
Toronto (at Frank’s insistence), fearful of people with guns,
and fearful in streets without electric lights. In Year Three he
stopped in McKinley and became the ‘guy everyone turns
to’ because of his paramedic training. In Year Fifteen he is
in Virginia with wife and friends, enjoying the tranquility
and ‘having lived to see a time worth living in’ (p. 271). He
hasn’t heard of the prophet, but treats a woman who’s been
shot because she wouldn’t stay with the prophet’s group.
Frank Chaudry was a journalist in the Middle East and is
in a wheelchair working on ghost-writing the memoirs of a
philanthropist. A realist, he encourages his brother Jeevan
to leave Toronto without him, saying ‘ ‘I think there’s just
survival out there Jeevan… you should go out there and try
to survive’ (p. 183).
Elizabeth Colton, an actress, moves in with Arthur after
the dinner party and becomes his second wife. When he
is 44, he leaves her for Lydia, and at about the time Lydia
divorces him, she takes their son Tyler to live in Israel (p.
111). Flying to Toronto for Arthur’s funeral, Elizabeth
and Tyler meet up with Clark in Severn airport. In Clark’s
opinion she is insane; she does not accept that the cause of
the pandemic was a virus, she shovels snow from the tarmac
believing a secret military will come for them. Tyler shares
her simplistic thinking, and they leave the airport after a few
years with a band of religious wanderers.

Tyler, Elizabeth’s son, receives a copy of Dr. Eleven from his
father just before Arthur dies. In the airport, he reads comics
after his Nintendo gives out on Day Three, then he reads
Revelations to the dead people in the Air Gradia plane,
claiming it’s so they ‘know that [the pandemic] happened
for a reason’ (p. 259). After he and his mother leave, they
live in St. Deborah by the Water. When the conductor
brings the Travelling Symphony back to St. Deborah by
the Water, Tyler says such alarming things that she has the
Symphony harness the horses and leave immediately (p. 62).
In Year Twenty, Kirsten leaves a page of the comic in his
hand after he is shot dead; to her, he is ‘just another dead
man on another road’. The page shows Dr. Eleven with his
deceased mentor Captain Lonagan (p. 303).
Victoria is Arthur’s friend from Delano Island to whom he
frequently writes letters which reveal his nostalgia for their
childhood, and information about each of his marriages.
Victoria later publishes the letters under the title Dear V,
much to the horror of Arthur’s wives and his friend Clark.
Gary Heller, Arthur’s lawyer, is at the dinner party in Los
Angeles; he shares with Clark the task of notifying people of
Arthur’s death.
Lydia Marks, Arthur’s third wife, co-stars in a film with
him. Arthur tells Jeevan about moving in with her, and
Jeevan promises not to publish for 24 hours. August, who
looks for TV guides when he and Kirsten raid abandoned
houses, sees a tabloid picture of her shopping in New York
(p. 200).
Tanya Gerard looks after Kirsten and the other little girls
who appear in King Lear. She gives Kirsten the paperweight,
although Kirsten doesn’t remember (p. 26). Arthur wants
to pay her college fees, but then dies; Heller tells Clark that
Arthur was having an affair with her (p. 221).
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
The Travelling Symphony is a group of people who live,
travel, rehearse and perform together ‘365 days of the year’.
The Symphony, like ‘every group of people everywhere’, has
tensions, but they find their petty irritations and simmering
resentments bearable because of the camaraderie, the music,
the Shakespeare and the ‘moments of transcendent beauty’.
They include:
Kirsten Raymonde, child actor in the Toronto production
of King Lear, is considered by Miranda, in Arthur’s dressing
room two weeks before the collapse, an assertive, beautiful
7-year-old who will grow up to be ‘unadventurous and
well-groomed’. But instead, the pandemic puts her ‘on the
road’ with her brother Peter, who hoped his little sister
would ‘never remember’ the road (p. 304) as it gave him
nightmares. She joins the Symphony when they find her in a
town in Ohio. More than a decade later, her life threatened
by the prophet’s men, she will reflect on how ‘desperately’
she loves them all. Devoted to the Symphony’s motto
‘Survival is insufficient’, Kirsten plays characters such as
Titania or Cordelia in their Shakespeare productions. In the
first year with them she killed a man, two years later outside
Mackinaw city another man, just prior to performing Romeo
and Juliet. She doesn’t relish killing, but does it ‘to survive’;
she hopes that young Alexandra will be able to live out
her life without killing (p. 133). She is often scouting or
raiding buildings with August, ‘looking for a lost world’.
Her relationship with Sayid breaks up; there is tension
between them, but she remains attached to all members of
the Symphony. She is particularly concerned about Charlie,
and friendly with August and the older Dieter. In interviews
with Diallo, she remembers Arthur’s collapse and a man
who was with her then; she remembers machines that play
music, computer screens, fridges that ‘had light inside’—
memories which leave her with a fascination for electricity.
But she can’t remember who gave her the paperweight,
how she got her scar, what happened to her parents: ‘the
more you remember the more you’ve lost’. When her life is
threatened by the prophet, it is her memory of the words
from Miranda’s graphic novel that, in part, saves her: ‘We
long only to go home… We dream of sunlight, we dream of
walking on Earth’ (p. 302). Ultimately, it is meeting Clark
at the Museum of Civilisation that may be the catalyst for
finding her ‘lost world’.
August, second violin, poet, and lover of orchestras, plays
the part of Edgar in the Symphony’s King Lear. He had
wanted to be a physicist, and as a person who thinks of
alternative universes, he loves Star Trek—he recounts for
Kirsten the Voyager episode, which vaguely evokes her
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V A T E Inside Stories 2019
memory of family life (p. 120). He likes scavenging with
Kirsten; he ‘always says a prayer’ over skeletons (p. 128),
and they have discussions such as the one about parallel
universes (p. 203). When he kills the gunman (p. 283),
Kirsten thinks he’s been lucky to get through twenty years
without killing.
The Conductor (who has killed four men) and Gil (who
vaguely remembers something about Science) are older
members of the Symphony. Dieter remembers airplanes
and dreams of the lost civilisation. Twelve years older than
Kirsten, he doesn’t like her tattoos but is her good friend
(p. 133). Alexandra, 15, the youngest actor, is found on
the road when the prophet wants her as bride. Olivia, 6,
daughter of the tuba, could also be at risk. Lin performs in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jackson and Viola go with
Kirsten and August (p. 128) to scout an old school. Sidney,
the clarinet who had lived alone for three years after the
collapse and hopes Gil might stage her play (p. 289), is
taken by the prophet’s men when she and Jackson go to get
water (p. 140); the Symphony is confused and worried by
her notes.
Charlotte Harrison (Charlie), Jeremy Leung (sixth
guitar) and baby Annabel stay behind in St. Deborah
by the Water when Charlie is pregnant. The Travelling
Symphony returns two years later to find they’ve left; grave
markers in the cemetery increase the tension, but it emerges
that they left because the prophet wanted Charlie. Kirsten
is delighted to re-unite with her friend Charlie when she
and Jeremy walk into the airport in Year Twenty. Charlie has
four knife tattoos, Jeremy two.
François Diallo had an apartment in Paris, survives the
pandemic and later has a library in New Petoskey, where
he also publishes a newspaper. His interviews with Kirsten
provoke her memories and he gets her to talk off the record
about killing, although she can’t remember how she got
the scar in Year One. In Year Fifteen, having interviewed
the Travelling Symphony, he goes with Kirsten to hear
Beethoven.
14
Issues and themes
Morality and courage
Despite having to survive in a harsh world, most of
Mandel’s characters display courage and moral strength
as they make choices that are ethical, selfless, loving, and
focused on what is inspiring in the human condition—art,
drama, music, history, science, and meaningful work. The
motto ‘survival is insufficient’ poses a challenging question
for those living in hard times: what more should one expect
of oneself than mere survival? It is Arthur’s mere survival
that Jeevan fights for when he tries to resuscitate ‘Lear’
onstage, but by this time Jeevan himself, having ceased to
be an ‘entertainment journalist’, is doing more meaningful
work as a paramedic—he is a character with a conscience, a
desire to pursue ‘truth and beauty’, and later, when survival
is a daily battle, he does not want to ‘let go’ of knowledge
from the past (p. 270). Engaged prior to the collapse in
the ethically compromised business of selling photographs
of celebrities, he at least has the decency to feel bad about
it. His true vocation is to help people; he tries to help
Arthur, he does help his brother, and later he becomes the
paramedic whom everyone seeks out. Whereas Jeevan is
quite certain about doing meaningful work, ‘I want to do
something important’, Arthur remains uncertain: ‘I want
to do something remarkable but I don’t know what’ (p.
156). Mandel values decisiveness, agency and courage in her
individual characters.
Kirsten, despite experiencing such childhood trauma
that most of the details are erased from her memory, and
despite having killed people herself, hopes for a time when
others would ‘live out [their] life without killing anyone’
(p. 133). At twenty-seven she is resilient and adaptable,
a strong yet sensitive character with an enquiring mind,
motivated by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. Not
only does she manage the petty irritations of life and work
with the Travelling Symphony, but she also manages the
daily struggles of survival, the serious security issues they
face, and the associated fears and conflicts. With her active
interest in both the arts and sciences (especially electricity),
she is a female hero, a character with a conscience and with
leadership qualities.
Clark is another character who has done more than
merely survive. Even at seventy, he exemplifies an idealised
individualism; he has worked hard and loved well but still
had time for friends and for reflecting on whether his own
moral compass was holding true. When the apocalypse
confines him to Severn airport, he pays attention to other
people’s grief and distress even though he has grief of his
own. With wisdom, intelligence and this outward-looking

nature, he becomes a leader in his community. Age is no
barrier to his usefulness in his community—Clark initiates
the Museum of Civilisation, is empathetic in his dealings
with people, and when he finally meets up with Kirsten, he
encourages her curiosity, energy and thirst for knowledge, as
an ideal father would.
The novel suggests that mere survival is insufficient—
strength of character is also required. Characters such as
Kirsten, Clark and Jeevan make moral and ethical decisions
that take account of other people’s needs as well as their
own, they are able to change and adapt, they engage in
honest self-reflection, and despite the extreme difficulties
of their situation, they remain optimistic, enquiring, and
forward-looking.
Tyler’s acolytes illustrate the opposite of personal agency
and moral courage when they use the familiar excuse for
bad behaviour: ‘“What choice do I have?… this time we
live in, you know how it forces a person to do things.”’ (p.
292). Miranda, on the other hand, develops agency and
courage as she grows older, despite often feeling isolated
and marooned. She commits herself for a few years to being
Arthur’s wife, she supports herself working and travelling for
Neptune Logistics, but primarily she devotes her life to her
art. Ultimately, as is often the case with art, her creation has
a life of its own; the volumes of Dr. Eleven go on to inspire
and enrich the lives of other people in ways the artist herself
may never know.
The importance of the arts and sciences
With Miranda’s art as its central motif, the novel highlights
the importance in society of both the humanities and the
sciences. We see Mandel’s characters devoting themselves to
visual and performing arts because these show the best of
a society, and to writing—history and the media—because
by keeping records of the past, humans have a hope of
understanding the present and doing better in the future.
We see the characters remembering electricity and airplanes,
and hoping for the resurgence of these lost wonders of the
world because they represent high points in humankind’s
scientific knowledge. The novel’s concluding image is an
enigmatic, almost ‘otherworldly’, tribute to the sciences:
Perhaps vessels are setting out even now…
steered by sailors armed with maps and
knowledge of the stars, driven by need or
perhaps simply by curiosity… ships moving
over the water, towards another world just
out of sight. (p. 333).
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
From the novel’s opening sentence, Shakespeare’s plays are
accorded particular significance, although comics (Calvin
and Hobbes, Dr. Eleven), movies and TV (Star Trek), poetry
and orchestral music also rate highly in Mandel’s lists of
what we would miss most about the world. The Travelling
Symphony performs classical and jazz music, and orchestral
arrangements of ‘pre-collapse pop song’. They initially
perform ‘modern plays’ too, but then notice that audiences
‘prefer Shakespeare to their other offerings’ (p. 38). It is
the bard’s plays and classical music that are, in Mandel’s
novel, the ‘best about the world’. The Symphony characters
‘thought that what they were doing was noble’ (p. 119),
and their work is particularly inspiring because it ‘seemed
a difficult and dangerous way to survive’. Miranda claims
that her art is important and she doesn’t care whether it is
published or not, (p. 95); Jeevan doesn’t begrudge Frank his
strategy of ‘hiding in his [writing] project’ (p. 178); Clark
sees all objects created by ‘human enterprise’ as beautiful
and ‘weeps at the beauty of flight’; Frank Diallo tells Kirsten
‘I believe in understanding history’ (p. 115). Even Arthur is
perhaps redeemed by his late-life work as a Shakespearean
actor.
In the opening scene of Station Eleven, the whole world
is about to be ‘unmoored’, as is King Lear in Act IV. In
this little world of the stage (as in the little world of, say, a
snow-dome or a space-ship), life’s drama is being played out:
as Arthur muddles his lines and dies, the child he reaches
for might be his ‘lost’ son, the eyes he remembers might be
Kirsten’s or Tyler’s, the women who ‘down from the waist…
are Centaurs’ might be his later wives, the kindly old
Gloucester might be his friend Clark or his putative saviour,
Jeevan Chaudhary. Arthur is no longer Lear, nor even
himself. His life as actor, celebrity, husband, friend, father is
ending. It is Jeevan who is ‘in the eye of a storm’ between his
past and future life, as is the little girl playing Cordelia who
will go on to act those strong female Shakespearean roles in
later life. She is the child whose truthfulness and love the
old Lear recognised too late, just as Arthur failed to accept
the love offered to him by numerous women. Arthur and
Jeevan, both fathers as were Lear and Gloucester, at different
times try to make sense of their lives. Arthur ‘repents
everything’ by the time of his death—he wants to give away
all his possessions, he is ‘wifeless’, and any remaining sense
of meaning in his life focuses solely (and, we later realise,
ironically) on his son—whereas Miranda ‘regrets nothing’,
and Jeevan years later feels grateful for his life, ‘overcome
by his good fortune’ (p. 271). Just as Shakespeare’s drama
triggers our hope that peace, goodness and justice might
prevail against conflict, evil and malice, so too does Mandel
deploy her art in the service of this biblical idea.
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V A T E Inside Stories 2019
Art imitates life, and those who view or read it may
experience awe at its beauty, and inspiration for their own
ideas and values. Miranda’s graphic representations of Dr.
Eleven and his ‘broken… little planet’ act metaphorically
throughout the novel, ultimately to suggest that even the
enemies of the Undersea are ‘not really bad’ (p. 325). Just
as creating art or useful objects can take us out of our self,
so Clark’s Museum of Civilisation is seen to give him a new
lease of life. Clark’s epiphany happened when he interviewed
Dahlia and realised he’d been ‘minimally present in this
world’ and ‘had no right to judge’ people. He becomes the
wise elder of Severn airport partly because of who he is,
and partly because it dawned on him in that interview to
ask ‘When had he last felt awe or inspiration?’ (p. 164).
Clark lives to have the satisfaction of not only feeling
awe and inspiration himself, but of providing it for other
people through his grand tribute to arts and sciences in his
Museum of Civilisation. He explains to a young person that
airplanes and rockets are incredible, ‘especially the parts
having to do with travel and communications’ (p. 232).
Beauty and belonging—the sweetness
of life on Earth
Mandel conveys through the visionary Miranda the idea
that art, as well as memory, reflects and plays back to us
the deep sense of awe we feel for the beauty of the world.
Literary word-pictures of the beauty of Nature, and of
ordinary things in everyday life, convey the sense that our
memory of beautiful landscapes can be comforting as well
as awe-inspiring. Sunrises, trees, water—the ubiquitous
descriptions of landscapes act to remind readers of all the
things we might be taking for granted in our world, the
things we would miss if some dark force brought about
an apocalyptic dystopia. Fighting against sickness and
exhaustion to get to the Malaysian beach where there ‘might
be fishermen’, Miranda opens her eyes ‘to see the sunrise…
container ships… suspended between the blaze of the sky
and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused
visions of Station Eleven’ (p. 228). Her art, formed from
her experiences and memories, sustains her even when she is
(perhaps) dying. Her artist’s vision may be ‘bleeding [and]
confused’ but sunrise, sea and ships evoke for her a sense of
belonging and ‘the sweetness of life’.
Arthur longs for the simplicity and beauty of his childhood
home on Delano Island. Writing to Victoria, he thinks of
the island where they grew up as being ‘like a dream… a
different planet’ (although his memory may be unrealistic,
as it’s also an isolated place with an eerily deep lake). Living
in Toronto, he remembers ‘true things’ such as the beach,
trees, building forts in the forest with his brother (p. 155).
16
He marries Miranda partly because, being also from the
island, she understands his sense of belonging ‘on an island
in the ocean [where] at night the sky was brilliant in the
absence of all these city lights’ (p. 207). At the end of her
marriage, Miranda whispers to Luli ‘this life was never
ours… we were only ever borrowing it’, an idea echoed
in the assassin’s note left on Captain Lanagan’s body: ‘We
were not meant for this world. Let us go home’ (p. 105).
Miranda incorporates in her Dr. Eleven comics ideas of
longing for the place we belong, ideas born of her own sense
of homelessness. Her hero Dr. Eleven, living on an island on
Station Eleven surrounded by darkness and by his enemies
in the Undersea, ‘stood looking over my damaged home and
tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth’ (p. 214).
Fantasies about a parallel universe enable Mandel to show
us other aspects of our contemporary life that we would
miss in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Utopia for Kirsten,
after her years on the road, would be streets and buildings
with electricity. Fridges with lights inside, telephones that
worked, better dentistry, these are the things that Kirsten
longs for in a parallel universe (p. 203). As a realist, she
has a more prosaic view than August’s interest in space
travel. She is aware there could be ‘much worse’ situations
than theirs; like August, she is grateful at least to have the
orchestra and the friendship that the Symphony offers them,
but is very worried when anyone goes missing. She would
prefer that their little society could offer better security for
them all. Ultimately, what Kirsten values most is the beauty
of electricity and ‘the moments of transcendent beauty and
joy’ when the Travelling Symphony performs ‘the music and
the Shakespeare’ (p. 47).
Memory—the self and society
‘Dieter and Sayid probably remembered what it was like to
live in houses and carry keys.’ (p. 199). The older characters
have become repositories of knowledge from before the
collapse, although Kirsten wishes they would remember
more about science! Memories can inspire individuals to
find a reason for going on, especially in times of crisis.
Memories of family or of something beautiful can help
people whose very survival is under threat. What and how
characters remember the past influences their sense of who
they are, both personally and as a society, while the desire
to be remembered by others influences how people act. But
forgetting can be helpful too, as Kirsten and Jeevan both
illustrate.
Mandel suggests, in her description of the older Clark
dozing and spending ‘more time in the past’, that our
memories are like ‘a series of photographs and disconnected

short films’ (p. 278), and that in old age memories can
be comforting: Clark ‘liked to close his eyes and let his
memories overtake him.’ At the pivotal moment in the
airport when he realises something extremely dire has
happened, Clark steadies himself both by thinking positively
of an imaginary future in which he will again be with
Robert, and by remembering good things from his past.
Conversing with ‘imaginary Robert’ (p. 240), he remembers
personal details of his loved one, and distracts himself by
remembering happy events such as ‘dancing with Arthur
when they were young in Toronto’ or pleasures such as the
taste of an orange drink. Clark is also realistic; with his
memories now ‘cast in a sharper light’, he lists the things he
has done for ‘the last time’ (p. 231). As someone who often
‘circles back’ (p. 278) through his own memories (and as
a kind, affectionate person), Clark empathises with others
who might be affected by their memories; he wants to notify
the ex-wives of Arthur’s death because he thinks they must
experience ‘some sense memory of love’ even after their
marriage has ended (p. 219).
On the other hand, Jeevan’s ‘barely submerged’ memories
(like Arthur’s of the deep lake) are not comforting. When
he remembers leaving Toronto—the snow, the lack of
electricity, his fear of people with guns—he needs to soothe
himself with the beauty of the immediate present: his wife’s
hand and kiss, his child’s silky hair, or smoking his pipe.
Later, he ‘rarely thinks of his old life any more’, preferring
instead to focus on his family’s daily activities such as baking
bread (p. 313). Kirsten, who has very few memories from
the years around the pandemic, believes ‘the more you
remember, the more you’ve lost’ (p. 37) and is anxious about
‘misremembering’ the previous sojourn in St. Deborah by
the Water (p. 44). She does remember electricity though,
and after many years on the road it is her curiosity about
electricity that motivates her to keep going even though
travelling is difficult and dangerous.
Besides affirming the importance of science in this way,
Mandel shows us the importance of historians and curators
in preserving a whole society’s memory. Collating and
curating society’s memory is important, whether the
memories are negative or positive. Clark collects artefacts
from pre-pandemic times in his Museum of Civilisation,
and finds satisfaction in this worthwhile work. Jeevan
and his friends debate whether to teach their children
historical facts about society instead of letting them think
that ‘antibiotics or engines [are] science fiction’ (p. 270).
Jeevan, despite liking some aspects of his post-pandemic life,
states clearly that he doesn’t want to let go of knowledge of
the past, perhaps because he finds it distressing to have no
anaesthetics when treating people in pain.
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
Miranda experiences a particularly luminous moment on
the beach in Malaysia as she remembers, from that last day
she saw Arthur in his dressing-room, the beauty of simple
everyday things: ‘the scratching of the little girl’s pencils…
the steam rings that their mugs left… the pleasant heat of
the tea, the warmth and beauty of [the] room’. She captures
in her art the memory of people and places she has loved:
the island of her childhood, the calm and uncluttered office
from which she could gaze at lake and horizon, people at
a dinner party. She realises that without even one of the
people in her life, ‘the world is a subtly but unmistakably
altered place’ (p. 225).
Like Kirsten and her Symphony friends who survive the
pandemic to become actors, Arthur commits to memory
the many words of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘he knew… some
of everyone else’s lines too, because he liked to know what
was coming’ (p. 319). However, his memory fails him in the
end. He skips ‘back twelve lines’ (p. 3), just as earlier that
day he skipped back three decades when searching out the
diner he remembered having been in with Clark (p. 318).
Arthur may remember playing in the treehouse with his
brother or dancing with Clark, but mostly he has devoted
his life to the business of being seen and remembered by
others. Mandel seems to suggest that there is a hollow at
the core of Arthur’s life, something not real or genuine.
It is Jeevan’s brother Frank who writes in his memoir
that although some ‘actors use their celebrity’ to pursue
worthy causes, ‘let’s be honest, none of them went into
the entertainment industry to do good in the world’, all
they wanted was ‘to be noticed… to be seen’ (p. 186). This
thought leads Frank to think about immortality, about how
people just ’want to be seen, then… to be remembered’ and
how film stars seem to be immortal because their films live
on. But celebrity status and immortality come at a cost for
Arthur.
Trust, community, connecting with others
Miranda, as an artist, connects with others by using her
eyes. She makes the effort to look at a fellow-sufferer in the
hotel in Malaysia, thinking ‘I see you, I see you’, trying to
give to this dying man a sense of being seen, noticed, and
remembered, and hoping that it’s ‘enough’ (p. 227). She is a
person who knows how to look after herself but also how to
be sensitive to the needs of others. Jeevan is a community-
minded person too. Although he mercilessly used Arthur’s
celebrity, tried to save Arthur’s life but failed, and was fearful
of the pandemic, he ultimately experiences the deep joy and
contentment of community, family and fatherhood that
eluded Arthur, and he connects with others, as a paramedic,
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V A T E Inside Stories 2019
by using his hands. Arthur, on the other hand, burdened at
the end by his money, possessions and fading celebrity, has
lost any lasting or real connection with his loved ones. He
dies surrounded by people, but alone. The one person who
really matters to him, his ‘beloved only son’ (p. 280), is far
away.
The human need for family and friends, and the desire to
avoid loneliness, is poignantly illustrated by the stranger
accepted into the airport on Day 100, crying because he
‘thought [he] was the only one’ (p. 257). Clark understands
the need to build a community so that people can feel
noticed, connected and remembered. Diallo is also a
community builder—his newspaper will connect people
in all the separate towns, and his oral history will connect
communities with their past and future. Clark feels ‘an
aching tenderness for his fellow refugees, these… strangers
here in the airport’ (p. 240) and he wants to be more present
and honest in his dealings with others than he was when
he used to speak of his clients in impersonal managerial
language. He values paying attention to people with a
genuine sense of empathy, listening to them. Paradoxically
though, he is nevertheless decisive about whom he trusts—
although ‘kind’ to Elizabeth in the airport as she explains
her mad concepts of vampirism and quarantine (p. 250), he
barely conceals his impatience with her rigid ideas, and has
no time at all for Tyler’s subsequent descent into tyrannical
ravings.
This tarnished world—abuse,
loneliness, fear, disease and isolation
Just as there were plagues, pestilence and contagion in
Shakespeare’s time, so is there the ‘Georgia Flu’ in Mandel’s
imagined world. In its wake comes the fear that Jeevan
experiences as he leaves Toronto, fear of disease, violence
and the collapse of all the civil infrastructure to keep people
safe, such as electric lights in the streets. For those who
survive all this, there are choices to be made about how they
will adjust. Kirsten chooses to stay with the ‘noble’ life of
the Travelling Symphony, and to forget her time on the road
with her brother where people killed each other to ensure
their own survival. She knows, however, that travelling can
be a dangerous way to survive when people are cut off from
each other in separate small towns. When out scouting or
scavenging with August in an ‘empty landscape’, she feels
lonely, thinking ‘Hell is the absence of the people you long
for’ (p. 144). Loneliness is a condition shared by most of the
novel’s characters at some time.
Clark chooses to keep calm and adapt as civilisation
collapses around him in the airport. He realises that the
18
‘maintenance of sanity requires some recalibrations’ (p.
249). Elizabeth, on the other hand, is unable to adapt. She
is considered a ‘lunatic’ by Garrett, while Dolores observes
ominously that her kind of ‘insanity’ is ‘contagious’. Tyler
goes on to seek his own security by dominating others.
Things just happen—creating order from chaos
Elizabeth doesn’t understand that ambiguity is a healthy
thing in a civilised society—she wants simple explanations
for everything. Yet how a civilised community cares for its
individual members, or a society for its citizens, is a fluid
and sometimes ambiguous process. In a well-governed
community, education and ideas are valued, laws are
updated by elected representatives, change is embraced, and
corruption minimised by sharing around the leadership
roles. Maintaining such a community is complex, or, as
Clark puts it, civilisation is a ‘little fragile’ (p. 148). But
people like Elizabeth believe a conspiracy theory when
things go wrong, instead of understanding that events can
be random. Elizabeth can’t make sense of the idea that
civilisation has ‘come to an end’ (p. 148), she thinks they will
be rescued soon because disaster ‘always passes’. She thinks
there must be some explanation, and everything will soon
be back to normal.
Her son Tyler amplifies her simplistic ideas. A child when
stranded in the airport, he reads Revelations to the dead
people inside the Air Gradia jet because he ‘just want[s]
them to know that it happened for a reason’ (p. 259), a bit
like the way God judges people and sends plagues upon
them in Old Testament stories. It is understandable that a
child might seek concrete explanations for things like the
pandemic, but Tyler adds more ominous interpretations to
this simplistic idea—viz. those who died were ‘weak’, while
the good, the ‘saved’, are the survivors in his group—and
from this infantile logic, he builds a cult in which he himself
can do anything he likes. People have reason to fear him,
especially women such as Charlie, Eleanor and Alexandra.
Clark tries to explain to Elizabeth that the pandemic just
happened, that there’s been an ‘extremely deadly swine-flu
mutation’, some people got it and some didn’t, but she
insists on believing that a plane will land at the airport to
rescue them. Clark feels bad about not being able to pull
Elizabeth ‘back from the edge’. In Year Two, Elizabeth and
Tyler leave the airport with a band of religious people, and
when we meet Tyler again he has become the ‘prophet’.
Now a petty tyrant, he exhibits all the characteristics of
authoritarian cult leaders: he claims young girls as his
‘property’ and he preaches comforting simplicities such as
‘the virus was the angel’, ‘we must trust in the existence

of a greater plan’ and ‘our names are recorded in the book
of life’. His followers trust him, but at least one of them
eventually realises that his ideas are deluded, or wrong.
Mandel implies there are factors that lead to civilised
societies, and on the other hand, factors that lead to
totalitarianism or tyranny. Kirsten, the prophet’s nemesis,
understands from her years travelling through small
towns the difference between a civilised society and an
authoritarian one. As she says to Diallo:
Some towns are easier to visit than others.
Some places have elected mayors or they’re
run by elected committees. Sometimes a cult
takes over, and they’re the most dangerous…
they’re unpredictable. (p. 115).
She understands abusive, tyrannical rulers who claim young
girls for themselves, knowingly remarking, ‘they all have
dreams like that’ (p. 123). And Kirsten understands the
logical fallacy in the prophet’s ideas: ‘If you are the light…
then your enemies are darkness, right?’… and… ‘if you are
the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there is nothing
you cannot justify… nothing that you will not do’ (p. 139).
However, she is also the one who knows how to disarm the
prophet—she reaches out to the little boy in him with the
words of Dr. Eleven, ‘we long only to go home’ (p. 302).
She, like Miranda before her, understands the importance of
the arts to society.
Mandel dismisses simplistic ideas such as belief ‘in the
existence of a greater plan’ or subservience to a totalitarian
regime, endorsing instead a more nuanced idea of
community. When on Day 85 the people in Severn Airport
send away a rapist, they have truly become ‘citizens’ who,
as a viable and civilised society, are like a ‘candle… in vast
darkness’. Of course, the civilisation that Kirsten longs
to reclaim is also a place where ‘you… flip a switch and
the room fills with light… garbage is collected… there is
money… there are dentists’ (pp. 201–201). It is a place
where one can feel safe rather than fearful, and where order
is maintained in nuanced ways by an educated citizenry.
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
Language and style
Mandel uses a variety of structural features, text types,
tenses, and narrative voices in Station Eleven. The non-
linear structure keeps readers engaged as they infer the
chronological sequence of the narrative’s five decade time-
span. This feature also enables the juxtaposition of pre- with
post-apocalypse scenes or chapters, and such juxtaposition
enables Mandel to develop the characters, themes and ideas
in a recursive style that builds meaning by layers and mirrors
the recursive nature of memory.
The use of texts-within-the-text is another structural feature
that suggests layers of meaning:
• the letters Arthur writes to ‘Dear V.’ reveal his
human vulnerability;
• the oral history interviews Diallo does with Kirsten
for publication in his newspaper New Petoskey News
show what is important about both history and the
media;
• SMS messages and use of the present tense
heighten the tension in the final stages of Miranda’s
relationship with Pablo, revealing why she may feel
anxious about being homeless;
• tabloid snippets show the relationship between
printed media and celebrities—and also suggest
that tabloids have a dehumanising effect, whether
on the target, the media hack, or the reader/
consumer;
• the memoir that Frank is ghost-writing for a
philanthropist serves, like most of these text
devices, as a mirroring technique, in this case
providing comment on famous actors.
Miranda’s graphic novel is also a text-within-the-text. We are
privy to her processes of text-creation, her thoughts about,
and changes to, the images or captions. We infer not only
that most artwork is derived in some way from the artist’s
experience, but also that Dr. Eleven is Miranda’s alter-ego or
avatar. In what must be the longest sentence in the novel, a
summary of Miranda’s life after divorce (p. 107) reveals that
it is her drawing—creating the stories of Station Eleven—
that sustains her in the lonely life of business travel.
Along with the language of graphic art, Mandel deploys
the language of drama (‘fourth wall’) and of music, with
characters in the Symphony taking the name of their
instrument (‘the clarinet’, ‘the second violin’).
Mandel uses parallels, or mirroring, to highlight ideas,
themes and aspects of characterisation. When Kirsten
suggests to August she’d like ‘a parallel universe where my
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comics are real’, where they could board Station Eleven
and escape ‘before the world ended’ (p. 202), the parallel is
explicit rather than implicit, but more often it is implied,
such as when Jeevan, seeing in the Toronto snow ‘a streetcar
that floated like a ship out of the night’ (p. 16), foreshadows
Miranda’s interest in ships, ships on the sea or in space.
Images of sea, ships, and islands permeate Mandel’s
evocative descriptive writing; for example, the airport is
‘shimmering over an ocean of parking lot’. Sensual imagery
pervades descriptive passages such as Miranda’s visit to
Arthur’s dressing room (p. 215) or Jeevan’s post-apocalyptic
domesticity (p. 312), as it does our last view of Miranda, as
she sees the sunrise:
[a] wash of violent colour, pink and streaks
of brilliant orange, the container ships on
the horizon suspended between the blaze of
the sky and the water aflame, the seascape
bleeding into confused visions of Station
Eleven, its extravagant sunsets and its indigo
sea (p. 228).
Literary devices enhance the writing throughout; observe for
instance how the image and assonance of the first sentence
evoke the sense of a world on the brink of destruction: ‘The
king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.’
Some scenes are described in a segmented sequence like
a film or play. Scenes such as those in chapter 41 (pp.
225–228), or in chapter 43 (pp. 242–257) may call to mind
Jeevan’s ‘cinematic daydreams’, although his were a way of
escaping nasty realities whereas these scenes take us right
into nasty realities. Other scenes such as the Los Angeles
dinner party or the Toronto production of King Lear are
described in such detail that we can imagine them as a
movie—the significant effect of repeatedly re-visiting these
scenes may suggest a movie script, but most importantly it
suggests the recursive way that memory works.
Mandel mostly uses a third person omniscient (or distant)
point of view and the past tense, but frequently switches to
close third person narration or the present tense, or both.
For instance, although set chronologically decades prior
to the collapse, chapters 13, 14 and 15 are narrated in the
present tense, giving us a sense of immediacy and close
involvement with the events. In chapter 52, and in the
final paragraphs, the effect of switching to present tense is
particularly poignant as we feel close to the characters. The
narrative voice is usually that of an omniscient storyteller;
for example, ‘A year before the Georgia Flu, Arthur
and Clark met for dinner in London.’ (p. 110). But the
narration often moves from this distant third person to a
closer third person which enables the reader to be ‘inside
the head’ of a character. In this London dinner scene the
narration shifts from ‘Clark liked to think’, to ‘Do you
remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted
to ask’ and then to Clark’s thoughts, ‘He was performing.’
Another example of the narration shifting from distant
to close third person is when ‘Clark wandered into the
Skymiles Lounge’: ‘he found himself thinking of Robert…
Robert was a curator—had been a curator?... If Robert were
here—Christ, if only—if Robert were here…’ (p. 254).
Mandel’s narration often takes the reader inside the heads of
Jeevan (pp. 11, 274), Miranda (pp. 104, 213), Kirsten (pp.
308, 304) or Clark.
Dialogue usually shows characters connecting with each
other. In Year Nineteen, Garrett reads the ‘360 degree’
reports that Clark had written when he was a consultant.
With humour but also with pathos, he and Clark remember
the language of ‘corporate cliché’ (p. 278) that they used
back then, and they now wish they had more genuinely
connected with people. Mandel seems in this segment
to make scathing comment on some of the language
of our time! Mandel sometimes uses dialogue to show
characters disconnecting, their thoughts drifting away. It is
dialogue that shows Clark disconnecting from his phone
conversation with Heller (p. 222); his attention drifts away
to remembering Arthur, and he hangs up.
The language Mandel gives to the prophet is partly biblical,
yet she leaves us in no doubt that the prophet’s philosophy
is authoritarian, logically flawed, and entirely undesirable.
He starts, as a child, reading the Bible to the dead people
inside the plane on the tarmac at Severn Airport, because ‘I
just want them to know that it [the pandemic] happened
for a reason’ (p. 259) but over time he morphs this into the
idea that ‘everything that has ever happened on this earth
has happened for a reason’ (p. 59) and he uses that position
to justify his own domineering ideas and warped desires.
Mandel allows us to feel concerned for the young boy’s
trauma, but clearly does not ultimately approve at all of the
way Tyler uses language.

20

Close study
She ignores this, looking up at the house.
… I saw the light was on in here.
(pp. 102–105)
Miranda leaves the wedding-anniversary dinner. Aware
this is the end of her three-year marriage with Arthur, she
remembers its beginning and contemplates its end. She
sketches the scene of Dr. Eleven standing on the rock, goes
outside to sit by the pool and ripple the moon images,
and asks the lurking Jeevan for a cigarette. She plans to
become ‘independent’, and thinks of the ‘order’ at Neptune
Logistics, the ‘calm of the lake’.
• What do we learn about Jeevan’s and Miranda’s
attitudes to life and work? In what ways does
this passage prefigure their (chronologically) later
occupations?
• What does Arthur’s letter to ‘Dear V.’ tell us
about him? Just prior to page 153 (where we read
a number of the letters), we learn that Kirsten
once had a copy of the book Dear V; why did her
mother forbid her to read it?
• Miranda sees ‘a storm’ in the paperweight; she
decides to take it and ‘keep it forever’. What
significance do we see in the motif of the
paperweight at this point? Create a diagram
showing which characters own the paperweight
throughout the narrative.
• What changes does Miranda make to the text in
the panels of Dr. Eleven that she’s working on?
Why does she make these changes? What is lost or
gained?
Sometimes the Travelling Symphony
thought that what they were doing was
noble. … their parents—if she could only
remember their faces—somewhere near.
(pp. 119–120)
Kirsten enjoys August recounting the episode of Star Trek;
it allows her to imagine that she remembers living with her
family as a child. We find out about the Symphony’s mission
statement, and Kirsten’s ‘brand’.
• How does this passage explain the rationale for the
Travelling Symphony’s existence, and also its major
dilemma? Is it convincing?
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
• ‘Survival is insufficient’: what’s the origin of this
phrase? What is its meaning for Kirsten and/or the
Travelling Symphony? Do you agree with Dieter
that its origin lessens its profundity?
• Role-play Dieter and Kirsten’s debate about
tattoos. Use Finn’s tattoo and quotes such as ‘the
murdered follow their killers to the grave’ (p. 299)
in your debate.
• What is the significance of August’s enthusiastic
retellings of the Star Trek: Voyager episode?
• Can you find a parallel in the narrative for Kirsten’s
vague warm memory of family life?
• How are Miranda, Arthur, Dr. Eleven and
Elizabeth/Tyler referenced in this passage? Could
you argue that this passage also suggests something
about Clark?
In the fall of Year Fifteen … He hoped
for more newspapers in the years that
followed, but none came. (pp. 262–264)
Mandel’s language shows us that the arrival of a newspaper
is a wonderful moment. An Emily Dickinson poem and
an excerpt from a biography of Abraham Lincoln are
juxtaposed with more mundane matters such as offers and
requests for bartering.
• Which sentences in this passage show that
newspapers play an important role in a
community?
• Is Mandel suggesting that the words of great poets
or the lives of great leaders are just as important
as ordinary people’s lives and activities? Or does
the passage imply that ordinary people need to be
inspired by noble leadership and great art?
• Does this description of dawn remind you of any
other passage/s in the novel: ‘there was a moment
in the flight when the rising sunlight spread from
east to west… reflected in rivers and lakes thirty
thousand feet below…’? What is the effect of
Mandel’s mirroring technique?
• Why is the newspaper, and the interview in it, so
meaningful to Clark? In what ways does this Year
Fifteen scene prefigure events in Years Nineteen
and Twenty?
• How are Clark, Kirsten, Arthur, Jeevan and
Miranda all referenced in this passage?
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V A T E Inside Stories 2019
‘All of this,’ the prophet said … Alexandra
held a bottle of water to her lips.
(pp. 290–294)
The clarinet is a person who can think for herself. She
doesn’t hold Shakespeare in highest esteem as others do,
and is determined to write her own play (although she can’t
yet get past the opening line ‘I find myself immeasurably
weary and have gone to rest in the forest’). Undeterred by
the violence of the prophet’s men, and perhaps acting in
wordless tandem with Sayid, she frees herself and runs to tell
the Symphony to change course.
• Does the novel suggest that changing one’s mind,
acting independently, and thinking for oneself are
all ideal characteristics for citizens of a civilised
society? Give examples.
Sayid engages the prophet and his band in philosophical
dispute. One boy, despite knowing that what they do ‘is
not right’, uses the common excuse of those in the thrall
of a tyrant: ‘What choice do I have? … this time we live
in… forces a person to do things.’ Sayid’s logic is: ‘How do
you bring the light if you are the light?’ Kirsten’s logic is: ‘If
you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s
nothing that you cannot justify … there’s nothing that you
will not do.’ (p. 139).
• Does Mandel suggest that ‘the light’ refers to all
that is civilised and good, while ‘the dark’ refers to
all that is barbarous and bad? Or does the novel
suggest that binary opposition is often not a useful
construct? In discussing this, refer to the poetry
and/or art of Milosz and Lorca.
22
In Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit,
Dr. Eleven is visited by the ghost… It was
exactly like waking up from a dream.
(p. 330)
Miranda always travelled with her sketchbook. Over time
the focus of her work shifted from Dr. Eleven as the hero,
and she became more interested in the ‘limbo’ of the
Undersea (p. 213). She had discarded fifteen versions of
this image, we are told, before she had the ghost of Captain
Lonagan right, and this is the frame she thinks of, the frame
through which she slips, on the Malaysian beach.
• What is implied by: ‘this was the image she kept
thinking of, drifting away from and then towards it
and then slipping somehow through the frame’?
• What is the story of Dr. Eleven and Captain
Lonagan?
• To whom does Miranda give the copies of Dr.
Eleven, and who has them in Year Twenty?
• Vol. 1 No. 1 is Station Eleven; No. 2 is The Pursuit.
What parallels do you see here?
• When young Tyler explains to Arthur about
the comics, what significance do you see in his
statement, ‘it’s dangerous, because of the seahorses’
(p. 324)?
• Why does Mandel make Miranda ‘more interested
in the Undersea’?
• Read the scene where Kirsten places the page from
Station Eleven in the dead prophet’s hand. Why
does she do this?

Further activities
Characters
• Create a visual representation of the characters’
inter-relationships. In presenting to the
class, explain which characters are portrayed
sympathetically, and how. Are there optimists and
pessimists?
• Do you think Kirsten would resume her
relationship with Sayid? Why, or why not?
• What happens to Elizabeth? What did her son
mean when he said he saw her ‘die twice’?
• Conduct a ‘talking heads’ class. One student takes
the part of a character and answers questions.
Teachers could select at least ten characters,
possibly more. Questions could be submitted to
each ‘character’ beforehand to allow for preparation
time.
Texts within the text
In groups, re-read each of these and report to the class:
• What do Diallo’s interviews (in chapters 16, 18,
21, 31, 33, 35, 37, 45) reveal to the reader about
Kirsten? Why would they serve as a useful source
for historians of the pandemic and its aftermath?
Why does Diallo go to the trouble of publishing a
newspaper?
• What does Frank’s ghostwriting project suggest
about celebrities (p. 186)? Mandel interposes
Jeevan and Frank’s story with the Diallo
interviews—what is the effect?
• Do Arthur’s letters to V. add anything to our
understanding of him? Do you sympathise with
those who feel outraged about her publishing the
letters?
• What do the capital letters and italics (pp. 40, 201)
in the newspaper items suggest about celebrities
and the media? Does this accord with the
relationship we see in chapter 27 (p. 167), when
Jeevan interviews Arthur?
• What is the effect of the text messages (p. 89)
exchanged by Miranda and Pablo?
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
What would be lost?
• Mandel suggests what things we’d miss if we
survived a major collapse (pp. 31–32). Read and
discuss the list. In groups, decide whether you
agree with Mandel’s list, add at least ten extra
things, and report to the class. Here’s one to get
started: No more sewerage treatment plants.
• Conduct your own oral history interview with
someone over 50 who has experienced anxiety
about the world ending. When and why did they
fear that happening? What did they fear would
disappear?
• How important to a society is the survival of its
journalists, actors, cartoonists, teachers, curators,
playwrights, historians, poets, novelists and
classical musicians? The poet Bernard O’Dowd,
and G W L Marshall-Hall1, the first Ormond
Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne,
thought that the arts are ‘the saviour of true
democracy’ (Rickard). O’Dowd wrote (1909) that
it was the poet’s greatest function ‘to turn a mob
into a people’. Discuss or debate the idea that the
arts are central to the effective functioning of a civil
society.
Survival and Miranda’s Dr. Eleven
• Sketch one or two of the panels from Miranda’s
comic and explain your image and caption.
• Dr. Eleven is described from different points of
view: Miranda, Tyler, Kirsten, and a third-person
omniscient narrative voice. Explain these different
views (e.g. pp. 42, 83, 105, 304, 325, 330).
• Reread the scene where Kirsten ultimately
confronts Tyler (p. 302) and discuss whether these
two characters have divergent understandings
about what the comic means. If so, why? What are
other differences in how Miranda, Kirsten, and
Tyler think of the story? Kirsten finds the page torn
from Dr. Eleven in the prophet’s New Testament
(p. 304). What significance do you see in this
climactic scene?
• In writing, summarise and explain Miranda’s
graphic novel, and analyse its role within Mandel’s
novel Station Eleven.
1 <http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/marshall-hall-
george-william-louis-7499>
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Descriptive writing, dialogue, narrative voice Topics for debate

In groups, decide what it is about the narration and
language choices that make these passages evocative. Discuss
what role these passages play in the novel—and whether
they have parallels—and report back to the class:
• Kirsten visits houses looking for anything useful
(pp. 128–129)
• Miranda visits Arthur’s dressing room (pp. 208, 215)
• Jeevan walks the streets of Toronto (p. 19)
• Jeevan enjoys his post-apocalyptic domesticity (p. 312)
• Clark in the Skymiles lounge (pp. 254–255)
• If doomsday comes, only food and shelter will
matter, not the humanities.
• Station Eleven is more about love, truth, beauty and
nostalgia than about death, fear and loneliness.
• The arts are vital to maintaining the health of a
democratic society.
• Shakespeare’s plays and classical music have had
their day.
• Station Eleven shows that being part of a
community is necessary in order to have a
meaningful life.

• Miranda sees the sunrise (pp. 227–228).

Motifs, parallels
• Track where each of these appears in the novel,
and comment on the role it plays in the story:
the comet Hyakutake; the paperweight; Finn’s t;
Starship Enterprise; gossip magazines with pictures
of Arthur’s wives; knife tattoos on Kirsten’s wrist.
• Construct a competition: Who can find the most
parallels?

Preserving art and history

During the Second World War, people went to the trouble
of hiding the art and objects held in museums, art galleries
and libraries. In recent wars, ancient constructions and
libraries have been trashed. Imagine a war or some other
cataclysm is threatening in Australia. You are charged
with the job of rescuing and hiding the most important
Australian art, music, film, literature. In groups, decide what
you will save, and how.

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 VAT E Inside Stories 2019

Key quotes Community and connection

Creativity in the humanities and sciences ‘There has been a schism. There are people who… long only
to go home, to return to Earth and beg for amnesty, to take
‘Miranda discarded fifteen versions of this image before she
their chances under alien rule.’ (p. 83).
felt that she had the ghost exactly right’ (p. 330).
‘We were not meant for this world. Let us go home.’
‘It’s the work itself that’s important to me… not whether I
(Undersea assassin’s note, p. 105).
publish it or not.’ (Miranda, p. 95)
’how human the city is… a massive delicate infrastructure of
‘Survival is insufficient.’ (p. 119)
people’ (p. 178).
‘“People want what was best about the world,” Dieter said.’
‘Hell is the absence of the people you long for.’ (p. 144).
(p. 38).
‘he felt an aching tenderness for his fellow refugees’ (p. 241).
‘the Travelling Symphony thought that what they were
doing was noble… someone would say something
invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone Memory, nostalgia and loss
would find it easier to sleep that night’ (p. 119). ‘I returned to my city, to my shattered life and damaged home,
‘I believe in understanding history’ (p. 115). to my loneliness, and tried to forget the sweetness of life on
Earth.’ (Initial text for Dr. Eleven graphic, p. 105).
‘all objects were beautiful. He found himself moved… by
the human enterprise each object had required’ (p. 255). ‘the more you remember, the more you’ve lost’ (p. 195).

Survival, disease, death,

Work, leadership
violence in this tarnished world
‘Dr. Eleven is distraught… an associate [says] “You were his
‘I have walked all my life through this tarnished world.’
second-in-command, Dr. Eleven. In his absence, you must
(p. 304).
lead.”’ (Kirsten, p. 304).
‘the murdered follow their killers to the grave’ (p. 299).
‘Work is combat.’ (Jeevan, p. 103).
‘it is possible to survive this, but not unaltered; and you will
‘I want to do something that matters’ (Jeevan, p. 10).
carry these men with you through all the nights of your life’
‘when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the (p. 296).
last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he
‘There’s the death of the body and there’s the death of the
last felt awe or inspiration? (Clark, p. 164).
soul. I saw my mother die twice.’ (p. 62).
‘It’s the work itself that’s important to me.’ (Miranda, p. 95)
‘That kind of insanity’s contagious’ (p. 261).
‘they were exposed to a certain virus… You can look for
Beauty and truth
reasons, but… that’s all there is.’ (p. 259).
‘The station’s artificial sky was damaged in the war… so
‘At other times it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to
on Station Eleven’s surface it is always sunset or twilight or
survive’ (p. 119).
night.’ (p. 83).
‘This dazzling world.’ (p. 296).
A good and meaningful life
‘I live on… gossip… I live for… truth and beauty’ (Jeevan,
‘this was the image she kept thinking of… the captain is
p.102).
rendered in delicate watercolours, a translucent silhouette in
Clark explains to Tyler that people died ‘because they were the dim light of Dr. Eleven’s office’ (p. 325).
exposed to a certain virus… you can look for reasons but…
‘he was overcome by his good fortune… at having lived to
that’s all there is’ (p. 259)
see a time worth living in’ (p. 270).
‘The feeling that one’s life resembles a movie.’ (p. 157).
‘The way he’d spent his entire life chasing after something,
money or fame or immortality’ (p. 327).

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V A T E Inside Stories 2019
Analytical text response topics
• “Survival is insufficient.” How does Mandel show
that there is more to life than mere survival?
• “I see you, I see you, I see you.” ‘Miranda, more
than other characters in the novel, makes the best
of life despite feeling lonely and disconnected.’
Discuss.
• To what extent does Station Eleven suggest that a
crisis brings out the best in people?
• ‘Arthur may be the central character in Mandel’s
novel, but he is not the main character.’ Discuss.
• ‘Station Eleven suggests that it is better to be
inspired by truth and beauty than by success.’
Discuss.
• Discuss the roles played by Dr. Eleven and the
Museum of Civilisation in Mandel’s novel.
• ‘The characters in Station Eleven are sustained by
their memories.’ Do you agree?
• ‘Station Eleven is more about creativity in the arts
and sciences than about a post-pandemic dystopia.’
Do you agree?
• ‘Despite the extreme difficulty of their situation,
none of the characters succumbs to fear or
pessimism.’ Discuss.
• ‘The characters in Station Eleven are motivated
more by love than fear.’ Discuss.
26
Creative text response topics
• Write an extra chapter for the novel. What will
Kirsten and the Travelling Symphony find when
they reach the lights in the south? Explain your
choices for the chapter, including how you have
made it effective yet consistent with Mandel’s style.
• Perform Victoria’s monologue (in the style of the
monologues in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Bombshells),
or write an extra chapter that gives Victoria’s
story. Explain how your story or monologue
demonstrates understanding of the themes, ideas
and structure of Mandel’s novel.
• Script the night of Arthur’s collapse, and present
it as a film or a play. Explain how and what the
performance reveals about Arthur, Kirsten, Tanya,
Jeevan, and the novel’s motifs.
• Write and perform a monologue in the character
of Elizabeth. Explain how your monologue reveals
Elizabeth’s relationships and attitudes, and the
points of view of other characters.
• Create a storyboard outline for a film about the
lives of Kirsten and Tyler. Explain how your
storyline reveals the concerns of Mandel’s novel.
• Write, in about Year 25, Jeevan’s autobiography.
Explain what he has chosen to include or exclude,
and what this account demonstrates about
Mandel’s novel.
• Script and act the scene on pp. 296–304, using
monologues as well as dialogue. Chapters 23 and
49 may also be useful. Explain how your choices
reflect Mandel’s plot, characterisation, and themes,
meanings or parallels.
• Imagine this scene has been filmed. In a pause at
the moment just before the prophet is killed, script
and act his interior monologue. In explaining your
choices, explore the meaning of any themes and
parallels.

• Write another chapter, in which Miranda is still
alive after watching the sunrise from the beach
in Malaysia. You could develop this chapter
from the suggestion, p. 218, that the ships look
‘supernatural… otherworldly’. Explain how your
chapter builds on the themes, characterisation,
motifs and ideas of Mandel’s novel.
• Create your own short story about life in
Australia after a devastating epidemic. Consider
the plausibility of Emily St. John Mandel’s post-
apocalyptic predictions, and in your written
explanation, state why your story is more plausible
than Mandel’s. Which aspects of your language,
characterisation or plot make it more plausible?
Which aspects of Mandel’s story are missing in
your story? Why?
VAT E Inside Stories 2019
References
McCarry, S 2014, ‘“I Want it All”—A Conversation with Emily
St. John Mandel’, Tor.com, interview, Sep 12: <https://www.tor.
com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/>
Michel, L 2014, ‘Station Eleven’, National Book Foundation,
interview: <http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2014_f_mandel_
interv.html#.W30oAWQzaAx>
Milner, A 2012, ‘Science fiction and dystopia: what’s
the connection?’ The Conversation, August 30: <https://
theconversation.com/science-fiction-and-dystopia-whats-the-
connection-8586>
Nunez, S 2014, ‘Shakespeare for Survivors’, The New York
Times, Sept 12: <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/books/
review/station-eleven-by-emily-st-john-mandel.html>
O’Dowd, B 1909, Poetry Militant: An Australian Plea for the
Poetry of Purpose, Lothian, Melbourne, p. 29.
‘Reader’s Guide 2015-2016’, Michigan Humanities Council:
Great Michigan Read: <http://www.michiganhumanities.org/
documents/gmr/GMR-Readers-2015-16.pdf>
Rickard, J, in progress, The Deakin Circle, Monash Univeristy.
Rosenberg, A 2014, ‘What art will endure? Station Eleven
offers surprising answers’, The Washington Post, November
19: <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/
wp/2014/11/19/what-art-will-endure-station-eleven-offers-
surprising-answers/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1fd1a56ec840>
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VATE Inside Stories 2019

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