For Tuesday’s class – – in our classroom – – you’ll want to read Richard Matheson’s classic post-apocalyptic narrative: I Am Legend (1954). [Try to get to at least the end of Chapter 10.] (Available free online here on the motherbog.) This will be the first version of the “last man” narrative that we read.
Though Matheson’s novella is classified as “science fiction,” we might start by considering it as a rewrite of one of the first novels in English – – Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, an 18th-century narrative about a shipwrecked sailor who must survive on his own. “From this moment I began to conclude in my mind that it was possible for me to be more happy in this forsaken, solitary condition,” Crusoe reflects at one point, “than it was possible I should ever have been in any other particular state in the world.” We can already see the existential themes and questions posed by Defoe and developed (a bit obsessively) by Matheson: what does a “man alone” need to survive – – both materially and psychologically? what threats does such a survivor face – – externally and internally? Can one ever truly exist apart from society? How do memories of and relations with a “gone-away” world both sustain and disable us?
This is pretty heady stuff, perhaps, especially for pulp fiction like Matheson’s. We might start our discussion with a much more specific question: in a kind of Carvana paradise – – where Neville can pick and choose from any car he wants to drive, why does he stick with a Willys station wagon – – the Toyota Sienna minivan of 1954?