COMMENTARY: Station Eleven (2014)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work. For self-study purposes, there may also be extensive summaries of the plot in these notes. In short…
⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️
333 pages in 55 chapters broken up into 9 sections. §1 - 6C/32pgs, §2 - 6C/35pgs, §3 - 6C/48pgs, §4 - 8C/49pgs, §5 - 11C/32pgs, §6 - 4C/32pgs, §7 - 6C/52pgs, §8 - 5C/33pgs, §9 - 3C/20pgs
- §1C1 - holy motherfucking hell. What an opening. Damn. Got your tension, then abrupt shocking hook, the aftermath, then the emotional rollercoaster of Jeevan’s interiority… what he wants, doesn’t want, the high and the low of Laura’s text. Damn.
- §1C2 - great aftermath scene and a great tease/hook at the end.
- §1C3 - I’m getting COVID micro-PTSD here. This novel came out in 2014?
- I am only 28 pages in and I am so sold it’s not funny.
- §1 end - solid. So good.
- §2C7 - I don’t know if I’m being tricked here or not. St. John Mandel obviously know all the narrative tricks and gimmicks to get an emotional rise out of the audience and she’s using them all with aplomb. Like we are just forty pages in and she’s completely, fully, and utterly hooked me. She’s using the time jumps so that I’m already attached to Kirsten pre-Collapse and post-Collapse. She’s using Shakespeare and the surprising fact that people want the best of the pre-Collapse world. She’s using heavy world changing stakes literally… the one thing I complain about in comics when they don’t really shake up the status quo. She’s using post-apocalyptic emotional interiority the way I want it —- a sense of longing and nostalgia for the past, the desperate and hardscrabble life on the road, the reuse of dead technology in new ways, the faint glimpses of a distant past by jerry-rigged bicycle for electricity so you can connect to an Internet that might still exist like some weird hunt for a heaven. You have death, you have connection, you have grief, you have SCOPE. It’s like St. John Mandel is hitting every single one of my notes. I guess I’m wary because the story still needs to deliver for another three hundred pages and I don’t want to be disappointed but it’s like these first forty pages is everything I ever wanted in a novel packed so tightly into a perfect opening. So I’m being suss about it. It’s too good to be true.
- §2C8 - What in the actual fuck is going on here? An indie comic? A limited run? A mysterious author with the initials — which is probably a red herring — to a character I think we’ve met already? GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD MANDEL! Stop taking all the things I’m obsessed with and put it in your novel.
- §2 end - nice level of creepiness with the cult.
- §3C14 - Miranda Carroll. MC. Drawing a graphic novel. And of course. The title of the book is the title of the graphic novel so we get that thing literary authors love doing. Framing a narrative inside a narrative.
- Thought. It kinda feels like cheating (or it’s genius) to have multiple perspectives broken up into these small chapters. You get to jump around as an author, never worrying about building a long extended scene or sequence… you get all the benefits of making your emotional hit in small short stories as scenes, she’s also playing with medium a lot, which is something I thoroughly enjoy myself, and it’s low commitment as you build your blocks of story as opposed to say, parts two or three of Atonement where it’s like a forty or fifty page monster of a single sequence of scenes all tightly bound by space and time.
- End of §3. The character of Arthur as one of the pivotal POVs is interesting. The nature of global fame to be specific. As I write this in October of 2025, while we’re not in a post-apocalyptic future, we are in a fragmentary disarray with violent conflict that puts us at the brink of further global violence. And for the last two years now, I’ve had this dread, not helped by reading Peter Zeihan than this current world that I grew up in, this Pax Americana that occurred post WW2 where we had globalized citizens for the first world, it’s all crashing and ending. It was a lucky 80 years of you were in the West. And when I was at the Stereolab concert… it struck me that maybe bands like these… who go across oceans and build a global fan base, who stream and have worldwide audiences — this might be something unique to the past eighty years and it might just end and fall into a fragmentary disarray…. We’re already seeing it in some regards. Aside from Taylor Swift… who else has this global recognition? This was the norm for pop stars in the 80s and 90s. A shared globalized culture… supported by infrastructure and politics and free trade and all the systems and institutions that uphold a globalized world. And now it’s falling apart. So Arthur is a perfect example of the pre-Collapse world. In the post-Collapse world, we’re back to the grind of traveling from town to town, meeting our audience one performance at a time, and not this globalized, asynchronous, on-demand platforms that anyone with an Internet connection can enjoy digitally.
- §4C19 - we haven’t seen Jeevan post-Collapse yet. He’s going to make a midpoint reveal isn’t he? Wait. No. We saw him in the Miranda flashback. Nevermind.
- §4C23 - hmmm. Vanishing allied and lost the symphony. Where’s this going?
- §4C24 - there’s something so extremely touching about August mourning for the dead.
- §4 end- I’m sure there’s a theme to these various scenes — maybe about being lost and sleepwalking, maybe being unmoored from your own people —- but I’m tired and I don’t want to figure out why this section is called spaceship.
- §5C27 — heeeeey! It’s a Jeevan POV section. And what’s this? It’s the midpoint at pg. 167 you say? Seriously? Who predicted this?
- §5 end - last days of Jeevan with Frank.
- §6C39 - oof that hit me hard. Who would I call when my parents die? Which of my childhood friends actually knew my father or mother? None of them really. Who from my east Vancouver life would mean anything at this point?
- §6 end. It’s so smart how Mandel is creating urgency here. It’s bookmarking. We’re revisiting the opening scene but at different chronological sections. Like a couple weeks before, and we’re meeting characters we’ve met now, but from pre-Collapse and with new context of who they are and where they’ll end up and how innocent it is. All the stuff we get wrapped up in and how irrelevant it is post-Collapse. And also… I’ll admit, was a little slow on picking up the blatant imagery of container ships as the perfect representation of the globalized economy that’s about to collapse.
- §7C42 - ”furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting”
- §7C42 - the unreality, the liminal space between what’s real and what’s not.
- §7C43 - the teenage haircut making Clark feel like himself after decades of corporate respectability. That’s great.
- §7C43 - crap. Is Tyler the prophet? It’s fiction, so everything has to tie up neatly in a logical knot…
- Pg 253…. Yeah… Tyler’s the prophet…. Right?
- Pg 258… wait Tyler leaves in Year Two. So not prophet?
- Pg 259… he’s reading the Bible to a plane full of corpses. He’s the prophet. Goddamit. Act 3 mystery.
- §7C44 - you got my tear up moment, Mandel. But also, earlier this year when Michael Tworek was telling me about the network of letters… how intellectuals sent each other writing and then left comments on the marginalia. I would imagine that starts up again in this world.
- Pg 266 - copywriters represent!
- §7C45 - got me again Mandel. When the orchestra started up.
- §7 end - a false resolution in a way with a lot of denouement moments, lost lost connections, the remembered past, artifacts of nostalgia, social networks crossing paths … but with the dread of Tyler still hanging over everyone.
- §8C49 - goddammit, Mandel. You can write action well too?
- §8C50 - ”They retrieved the weapons, dragged the men into the forest to be food for the animals, and continued on into Mackinaw City to perform Romeo and Juliet.” damn….
- Pg. 303 - holy motherfucking Jesus Christ.
- Pg 306 - you got me a third time Mandel.
- Pg 311 - four times.
- Pg. 332 - one last time. The dinner scene.