Station Eleven: Post-Apocalyptic Comedy and the Improbable Happy Ending

We’ve watched the world end dozens of times. Over the last couple decades, post-apocalyptic stories have absolutely enraptured us. These stories are, by and large, bleak. They’re tragedies. For years The Walking Dead spun a very sad, very gory yarn about the inevitable erosion of people and places as human civilization succumbs to the zombie apocalypse. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road offers an awful gray world in which the ocean is no longer blue and any other human inhabitants are assumed to be robbing cannibals unless they prove themselves to be otherwise. The Last of Us, the video game and show, is another post-apocalyptic tragedy filled with death, loss, and human cruelty as the characters trudge through fungus. Post-apocalyptic stories have long been popular, but recently these movies, shows, and books have carved out an even larger space for themselves in the entertainment market. 

Post-apocalyptic stories are de facto tragedies. The genre requires massive amounts of death, loss, and violence after all. That’s why I was caught off guard when I read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. The novel’s plot centers on the end of the world, but here’s the thing: it’s hopeful. The book made me wonder, amid all the post-apocalyptic tragedies, is there room for post-apocalyptic comedies? 

Tragedy vs. Comedy

A terribly contagious and fatal disease called the “Georgia flu” spreads to all corners of the globalized world in an instant. Before humanity has time to react, the flu has killed over 99% of humans. The two years after the disease has run its course are marked by suspicion, traveling, and danger. After this grueling period, as people cope with the fact that civilization has collapsed and the world will never be the same, the world doesn’t continue to spiral into chaos but actually starts to get better. People begin to trust each other again by settling down into towns and villages together. Kirsten Raymonde, who was a child when the world ended and has lived in the new world for twenty years after the onset of “Georgia flu,” attests to how much safer the world has become. Over the course of the novel, she reflects that, “The world was softening” and that, “It’s much less dangerous than it used to be.”¹ 

These stable and safer conditions allow for the existence of (you guessed it) a traveling troupe of instrumentalists and thespians. The group is called The Symphony and is made up of musicians and actors who travel from settlement to settlement performing musical numbers and plays, including Shakespeare. This feature alone shows that Mandel has created a different, more optimistic world than many other post-apocalyptic landscapes. Try to shoehorn a troupe of traveling Shakespeareans into The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, or The Road. It just doesn’t work. They’d be ripped apart before intermission. 

Instead of a post-apocalyptic tragedy, Mandel has written what I’m calling a post-apocalyptic comedy. By post-apocalyptic comedy, I don’t necessarily mean our modern sense of comedy as a piece of entertainment that’s simply a vessel for jokes, devoid of any real stakes. Shaun of the Dead and other similar modern comedies have done that. I mean something more like a Shakespearean comedy. Shakespeare’s comedies, while indeed funny, often contain plenty of drama and real stakes. Hero’s character is assaulted in a false accusation and her friends assume she was “Done to death by slanderous tongues” in Much ado About Nothing. Twelfth Night begins with a twin brother and sister assuming their sibling died in a shipwreck. Measure for Measure includes dramatic soliloquies and the threat of executions punctuated by syphilis jokes. 

Clearly these comedies aren’t lacking when it comes to drama or substance. Comedies in this sense usually include a relationship that, “does not run smooth, yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union.”² Comedies descend into the darkness, messiness, and, yes, the humor of life for four acts, yet they end happily. As Lord Byron said, “All tragedies are finished by a death. All comedies are ended by a marriage.”³ There’s a lot of truth in this. You can usually tell what genre a play was by how it ends. Did one or more characters die at the end? You probably just watched a tragedy. Did two or more characters get married or was there a celebration in the final act? You probably just watched a comedy. 

Two of Shakespeare’s plays play out in Station Eleven: a tragedy and a comedy—King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lear is acted out two weeks before the world ends. The play, with its motifs of blindness, power-mongering, and trickery, epitomizes Mandel’s world before the apocalypse. No one is exactly happy before the world ends in Station Eleven. Clark, for example, grows frustrated with “iPhone zombies, people half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screens.”⁴ On his way to a work assignment, Clark tries to jostle these people by obstructing their way, forcing them to look up from their phone for a moment. However, one scene later Clark wishes he could find these people and apologize to them because he realizes he’s “as minimally present in this world” as they are.⁵ Rather than being lost in his smart phone, Clark loses himself in his work. He realizes this after a conversation with a woman who calls out the “High-functioning sleepwalkers” of the corporate world.⁶ For these people, “Work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness” but this ‘happiness’ is actually “distraction.”⁷ 

Most post-apocalyptic stories tend to idealize the world before its collapse, as if the end of the world were interrupting some perfect prelapsarian Eden. But Mandel is quick to point out the world’s flaws. Many people do drift through life dependent on their Apple or Android device. Others neglect their families, social lives, and physical health to pursue career advancements. Whether our fixation is our smartphone’s pixels or corporate promotions, many of us quiet our persistent misery by daily distraction. Doesn’t that make this world tragic? And if the end of the world also involves the end of these modern miseries, doesn’t that make the end of the world a good thing? 

A miserable man responsible for two failed marriages performs the tragedy King Lear before the world ends, while Kirsten and her troupe perform the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream after the end of the world. Unlike other depictions of the apocalypse, Station Eleven wonders if this world is in the final acts of a tragedy while whatever comes next is the comedy. What warrants the hope found in Station Eleven when almost every other piece of entertainment in its genre is bleak and tragic?

Happy Endings 

At one point during Station Eleven, a group of people are stranded at an airport after disease has decimated the world around them. The huddled mass of shell-shocked survivors have only recently come to terms with the fact that no one is coming to save them. This grim realization prompts a couple of pilots to commandeer a plane. It is the first time this group of people have seen a plane take off in a long time. For one character, watching the plane barrel down the runway and launch into the sky is an emotional experience. He asks himself, “Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it.”⁸

Emily St. John Mandel also had a memorable flight experience the day after her wedding. She was 26, flying to her honeymoon with her new husband. Someone had given the non-religious couple a copy of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, for a wedding gift. “Trying not to dwell on the heavy-handedness” of this gift, Mandel began to read the text during the flight.⁹ The secular author admits she grew bored with the book until she started reading Song of Songs. Perhaps especially drawn to this text given her recent marriage, she writes that the beauty of the Song of Songs, “pierced [her] atheistic heart.” Her praise for the biblical book soars; she describes it as “mysterious; gorgeous; sublime.” 

When the rest of the Hebrew Bible bored her, why would she connect with Song of Songs so poignantly? There are probably several reasons for this. Song of Songs is indeed unique in the biblical canon, the themes of the book probably resonated with Mandel’s situation, and the lyrical beauty of the poetry surely appealed to her writerly sensibilities. But deeper than all those reasons, I think the beauty of the wedding celebration featured in Song of Songs spoke to Mandel. A wedding is a beautiful thing. It includes some of the greatest blessings in life into a single celebration—family, friends, food, music, dancing, romance, etc. As Jesus said, weddings are occasions for feasting and celebrating, not fasting and mourning (Matt. 9:15). 

The Bible, like any good comedy, ends in a marriage celebration. After the horror of beasts, diseases, and cosmic ruptures, the apocalyptic book at the end of the Bible, Revelation, takes a decidedly comedic turn. In the closing chapters of John’s Revelation, everything has been made right, and John hears multitudes shouting in joy. The multitude exclaims in a voice like thunder peals and floods that the wedding feast of the lamb has come (Rev. 19:6-9). The lamb, Jesus, is finally celebrating his marriage to the bride, the church. Like any good comedy, Christ and his bride were the last people you would’ve paired together. Christ was the consummate faithful hero who chose to pursue a bride who was awful and unfaithful to him. But his love will prevail over all difficulties and he will one day enjoy his wedding feast with his beautiful bride, and we actually will live happily ever after. 

Most of the post-apocalyptic stories we enjoy are tragedies. They end in death, offering little to no hope. While there’s a place for these stories, Christians must remember that the Bible doesn’t have a tragic ending but a comedic one.

1.  Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 132, 114. ↩︎
2.  M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Gloss of Literary Terms. (Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 10th ed, 2012) 54. ↩︎
3.  Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto 3. ↩︎
4.  Mandel, Station Eleven, 160. ↩︎
5.  Ibid., 164. ↩︎
6.  Ibid., 163. ↩︎
7.  Ibid., 163. ↩︎
8.  Ibid., 247. ↩︎
9.  Emily St. John Mandel, A Closed World: On By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, The Millions, March 7, 2014. ↩︎