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ABSTRACT
Robert Kirkman’s comic series, The Walking Dead, depicts the odyssey of Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors as they seek to flee the living dead and find fraternity. As others have noted, the fear of a contagious otherness− and the consequent dissolution of community − is a dominant discursive strain in the post-9/11 world. These anxieties have led to the creation of containment tropes, not the least of which is the recent discourse on strategies for preventing immigration (‘I will build a great, great wall’). Such narratives always assume an ‘us’ that needs protection from ‘them’ – whether those others are immigrants, terrorists, or Ebola victims (zombies may stand in for one or all). In The Walking Dead, however, there is no question about making such distinctions – we are told that the zombie virus lies dormant within us all, waiting for our demise to burst forth. Zombiehood is now an irrefutable part of our existence. The series may be read, then, as a disquisition on the futility of constructing boundaries (socially, bodily, or otherwise). By challenging these constructions (literal and metaphorical), the text asks us to rethink the manner in which others, including the infected, are excluded – and on what grounds.
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Notes
1. See also Philip Simpson (Citation2014) who argues that TWD ‘suggests a Hobbesian leaning, that catastrophe brings out the worst in human nature and that strongmen leaders have no choice but to compete for dominance over a loosely allied group of passive survivors’ (35).
2. See also Harper, Attwell, and Dolphin (Citation2017) who assert, ‘the need for guns and walls is not ubiquitous; even though the use of both forms a central motif of surviving groups, fetishized attachment to property and place is depicted as dangerous and self-defeating’ (717).
3. Kirkman, Robert et al. The Walking Dead, Volume II. The comic series, as well as the released volumes and compendia, are devoid of pagination. As such, for practical reasons, I have chosen to identify the volumes from which the passages and quotes are taken.
4. For further discussion of the Rick-Hershel debate, see Mitchell (789–90, 798) and Sommers.
5. Canavan (Citation2010) similarly observes, ‘The telos of the fortress, like the telos of empire, is always, in the end, to fall’ (445). And a short time after their arrival in Alexandria, Andrea expresses the same sentiment when she tells Rick: ‘This won’t last … it never does. Enjoy it while you can – and pray it doesn’t make us too soft to survive when it’s over’ (XII).
6. This has been a recurrent theme in recent zombie works (including, in very different ways, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead). The presence of the undead is merely an emphatic reflection of what we were already.
7. For another perspective on Rick’s assertion, see Canavan (440–441).
8. See Holland-Toll: ‘it is the denial of the existence of “the beast within,” the fear that mankind is inherently monstrous, which creates the cultural dis/ease’ in these works of fiction (30).
9. As Swanson observes, ‘Because a zombie cannot be held morally responsible for its actions, yet can be laughed at and thus potentially sympathized with, it presents a threat both to a character’s life and to her or his likability’ (397).
10. Ironically, the Governor is later killed by one of his associates who calls him ‘a fucking monster’ (VIII). To be fair, this epithet is thrown around quite liberally in the series; Gregory calls Maggie a ‘monster,’ and even an imprisoned Negan (!!) resorts to the word in reference to Rick (XXIV).
11. Volume XV, in which this exchange occurs, is appropriately titled, ‘We Find Ourselves.’ At the same time, the title is ambiguous. Who, exactly is this ‘we’?
12. As Harper, Attwell and Dolphin note ‘None of these structures of governance are presented as an ongoing solution to the zombie problem, but at the same time, all highlight the importance of community, relatedness, and remaining committed to the collective code’ (719). Indeed, Rick’s transformation can be attributed to a growing recognition of the necessity of just such a ‘collective code.’
13. Harper, Attwell, and Dolphin take this idea further, suggesting that readers even experience a kind of envy: ‘it is hard not to contrast the alienation of us … with the human connectivity of the survivors’ (720).
14. One finds a number of such statements in Junger’s book, including the following: ‘Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals’ (44).
15. Coming back from a fishing expedition, one of the sailors tells Rick: ‘Big Haul. Almost more fish than water out there these days. It’s a wonder what the death of humanity does for ocean life’ (XXIV).
16. Boehm (Citation2014) makes a similar point: ‘Standing for absolute difference, the zombies negate all otherness, which had hitherto divided the world in terms of identitarian politics, and, consequently, they motivate a radical reconsideration of social classification’ (135).
17. See, for instance, The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture by Dina Khapaeva in which she contends that our growing fascination with fictionalized and graphic depictions of violence and death – in essence, a ‘cult of death’ – is the product of ‘a disillusionment with humanity that makes monsters attractive’ (1). She further suggests that this growing cult ‘signifies a rejection of the idea of human exceptionalism and is grounded in a long-standing tradition of the critique of humanism’ (1).
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Tim Gauthier
Tim Gauthier is currently serving as Director of the Multidisciplinary Studies and Social Science Studies programs in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). His research focuses on contemporary fiction and spans post-colonial concerns and artistic reactions to social and personal trauma experiences. In addition to peer-reviewed publications, he is the author of Narrative Desire and Historical Reparations – a study of A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie (Routledge, 2006), and Post-9/11 Fiction, Empathy and Otherness (Lexington Books, 2015).