What I immediately noticed about Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is his use of kairotic time similar to what we had read in “The Albertine Notes”. However, unlike “The Albertine Notes,” the use of kairotic time is easier to follow in Zone One. There is no concept of chronological time in “The Albertine Notes”; instead days are marked by events such as before Albertine or after the blast. In Zone One, events still play a big role in marking time, but there is still a sense of chronology. Whitehead emphasizes the before and after by adding a sense of nostalgia of New York pre-apocalypse.
Naturally, I would make a comparison to The Walking Dead (because clearly, my final paper topic is all that I can think about nowadays). There is definitely a lot less gore and violence in Zone One, but the amount that Whitehead spends on emotion and the human experience in a zombie apocalypse is similar to The Walking Dead. I think the success of Zone One and The Walking Dead is their ability to capture human emotion in a zombie apocalypse. They go past the violence and examine what it would feel for someone to go through all this loss. I think that P.A.S.D. is something that the characters in The Walking Dead experience, but it is never named or diagnosed like it is in Zone One.
In attempts to find out more about Zone One and its popularity, I came across this review on NPR that makes a case that Zone One is a metaphor for post-9/11 New York: “The 24-hour ashfall that results is just one of this disquieting novel’s canny echoes of post-Sept. 11 New York. After all, Zone One itself both includes, and seems like the natural descendant of, ground zero.” This comparison reminded me of last week’s reading and guest lecturer. Already, we are seeing examples of media that reflect the culture post-9/11.
I’m really unfamiliar with The Walking Dead, so it’s interesting that you bring up that comparison. It’s also true, I think, that comparisons can be drawn between post-9/11 culture and Zone One. I think for many people, it is hard to separate the idea, and perhaps culturally impossible, of a post-apocalyptic NY from the decimation done on 9/11, and how that in a way was a kind of city-based “personal” apocalypse on a larger scale. I can think of major changes in the world as pre-9/11 and post-9/11, pretty easily. That’s an interesting point I didn’t fully consider when reading the book on its own.
This is a great post–I actually hadn’t drawn the parallels between the Whitehead’s Zone One dystopia and post-9/11 New York, but going back and looking at a lot of the passages again, I can definitely see why others came to that conclusion. This brings a couple of questions to mind: does that mean the nostalgia for a pre-zombie New York with which Whitehead imbues this book is really a nostalgia for pre-9/11 New York? Where would P.A.S.D. fit into all of this, then?