ZOMBIES!!& APOCOLYSE

FICTIONA genre study

Our textsWarm Bodies – Novel (this term)

The Walking Dead – Graphic Novel (next term)

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats – Poem (next term)

What is genre?

What characteristics make up a zombie?

Where did the zombie genre come from?

• Early zombies – Zombies have been around since the 1930s.

• The "living dead" tended to be animated by a voodoo spell, and they were usually used as servants to the "master" who raised them.

• They had grey skin and their eyes were darkened or occasionally bugged to an extreme size.

• Typically, they were mute and slow moving, mindlessly following their master's orders (although at the end of the film, the master often lost control).

Zombies as we know themThe classic zombie is the invention of director George A. Romero. In 1968’s Night of the Living Dead he used some of the elements of the original zombies, like the slow movement, and added in the need to eat human flesh, that they can only be killed by damage to the brain, and that a bite will spread the infection. Romero was also the first one to use zombies as a vehicle to criticize real-world social ills—such as government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation—while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies.

• Can you think of any movies that have used Romero’s zombie and made changes to the genre? What changes did they make?

What else happens in zombie films?

• In groups discuss how they begin and end?

• Are there events that happens in all of them?

• Are there characters that tend to pop up in each one?

Common tropes for Zombie apocolypse fiction

There are several common tropes that occur in a zombie apocalypse:

• Initial contacts with zombies are extremely traumatic, causing shock, panic, disbelief and possibly denial, hampering survivors' ability to deal with hostile encounters.

• The response of authorities to the threat is slower than its rate of growth, giving the zombie plague time to expand beyond containment.

• The stories usually follow a single group of survivors, caught up in the sudden rush of the crisis. The narrative generally progresses from the onset of the zombie plague, then initial attempts to seek the aid of authorities, the failure of those authorities, through to the sudden catastrophic collapse of all large-scale organization and the characters' subsequent attempts to survive on their own. Such stories are often squarely focused on the way their characters react to such an extreme catastrophe, and how their personalities are changed by the stress, often acting on more primal motivations (fear, self-preservation) than they would display in normal life.

• Zombie Apocalypse stories are also generally bleak, and feature the Downer Ending — often times, Anyone Can Die n a zombie apocalypse, and it's not uncommon for some zombie stories to end with everyone either dead or, even worse having become a zombie themselves. Even if one or two people survive, then it's usually a bittersweet ending at best — the use of the word "apocalypse” in the description is a pretty good hint at what usually happens to the rest of the human race, whether or not the main characters survive here. It's often taken for granted that humanity is screwed when the dead rise.

Elements• Themes• Genre subversion• Characterisation• Literary allusions• Symbolism• Setting• Narrative voice• Dialogue

Genre SubversionWe have identified what tropes the zombie apocolypse genre tends to have….

Your task: Identify how Warm Bodies breaks/bends/sticks with those tropes?

What are some examples of this?

ThemesThrough his subversion of the genre, Marion is trying to convey a number of

messages. Your task: With each of the key words below try and decide what you think Marion is trying to tell us or teach us.

Life

LoveHumanity Death

Focus theme: What is the meaning of life?: life is more than just the opposite of death. It’s about more than just survival. It’s about people, love, art, music and language.

Characterisation

It allows Marion to subvert the genre and give us another way to look at zombies.

What literary technique allows us to know this?

What do we know about R? – Write down at least 3 details

First person point of view. Without this point of view, Rwould remain the stereotypicalzombie. Monosyllabic, unthinking, dead.

What does this technique do to the genre of zombie fiction?

So why is the characterisation so important ?Through first person

narrative, Marion allows R to become a thinking, feeling, sentient being.

Through R’s characterisation, Marion subverts the genre and allows the message to come through.

R as a character is what convinces us about life, love and what it means to be alive.

Handy hint: In an essay on the novel, your paragraph on characterisation would begin by explaining that we see the world through R’s eyes with first person narrative, and we discover the themes and ideas as he evolves. Then you would pick examples of when we see those changes and evolutions clearly or when we see his humanity clearly/subversions of the genre.

Literary allusionsShakespeare’s: Romeo and Juliet

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh (The Epigraph)

This passage is from the oldest surviving work of literature in the world.

It was composed around 1200 BCE (which makes it about 400 years older than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey).

The text is translated from clay tablets found by archaeologists.

You have known, O Gilgamesh,What interests me, To drink from the Well of Immortality.Which means to make the deadRise from their gravesAnd the prisoners from their cellsThe sinners from their sins.I think love's kiss kills our heart of flesh.It is the only way to eternal life,Which should be unbearable if livedAmong the dying flowersAnd the shrieking farewellsOf the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes.

It’s humanity’s oldest story and is the foundation for most other types of

stories. The big things Gilgamesh cares about are the same things we care about: having somebody in this world who really “gets” you; and trying to make your time on this earth meaningful. It also has the first literary mention of zombies (rising from the graves).

So what happens?Gilgamesh is part god, but he doesn’t have a friend. Then along comes Enkidu, part man, part beast. The two have a fight, but when they emerge they have a true respect for one another.

The two new friends go on adventures and during one of these adventures Enkidu dies. Gilgamesh is broken hearted and sets off in search of eternal life. What he

discovers is that humans can’t live forever --- but we can find peace in the legacy we leave behind after death.

Why is it important in our text?

What lessons does Gilgamesh teach?

Life isn't just the opposite of death. For Gilgamesh, who starts off a pretty knuckle-headed king, friendship with Enkidu and the trials he endures seem to breathe some life into his consciousness. We see him struggle with the meaning of and what it means to be alive.

Your task: Answer these questions.

• What things do the stories of Warm Bodies and Gilgamesh have in common?

• What do they think should be the focus of life? • What makes life more than just the opposite of death?• Why has Isaac used the epigraph?

Romeo and JulietAllusions

Your task: Identify as many references or allusions to the play as you can. (At least two!)

Class discussion: What is the effect of having this allusion? Why did the author do it?

More Characters

JulieWhat drives Julie?

What is important to her?What does she tell us about our theme?

General GrigioWhat drives Grigio?What event defines his and Julie’s life?

What does he show us about our theme?

Grigio:Julie, you are young. You don’t understand our world.We can stay alive and we can kill the things that want to kill us, but there is no grand solution. The world is over. It can’t be cured, it can’t be salvaged, it can’t be saved.

Julie:Who decided life has to be a nightmare? Who wrote that rule? We can fix it, we’ve just never tried before. We’ve always been too busy and selfish and scared! P 199

“Dad’s dead… he just hasn’t started rotting yet”. P 202

Who is this woman lying next to me, so overflowing with vitae she can grant life to a car? P 238

Your task: Answer the questions for one of the two characters. And then answer this: What do Julie and Grigio represent in the novel?

Language

Music

SYMBOLISM

Quote #1 I stare hard at the tag. [...] The letters spin and reverse in my vision; I can't hold them down. As always, they elude me, just a series of meaningless lines and blots. (1.1.34)

Quote #2 "No one writes, no one reads, no one really even talks." (1.8.46)

Quote #3 We taught them how to shoot, how to pour concrete, how to kill and how to survive, and if they made it that far, if they mastered those skills and had time to spare, then we taught them how to read and write, to reason and relate and understand the world. (2.2.14)

Quote #4 "Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory." (2.3.33)

Quote #5"The world that birthed [Gilgamesh] is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it." (2.3.39)

Quote #6 I've brought only two provisions: a box of pad thai and Perry's book. Thick. Ancient. Bound in leather. I open it to the middle. An unfinished sentence in some language I've never seen, and beyond it, nothing. An epic tome of empty pages, blank white and waiting. (2.7.98)

Your task: Your group will be assigned a quote regarding language, reading or writing. Brainstorm what you think it means symbolically in the novel.

Can anyone think of any other loss of language that is important in the novel?

LanguageThe first written text was written around 2500 BCE (The Epic of Gilgamesh – one of our literary allusions). That makes it the oldest book on Earth. Older than the Bible. And people are still talking about it. This alone shows the crazy longevity of the written word. The characters in that book—in any book—stay alive long after its author has moved on. Like everything in Warm Bodies, the ultimate result is life. Life is like one big system that's bigger than just people, and reading and writing is a crucial artery to keeping lifeblood flowing.

So language in Warm Bodies is:More than just words

LifeCommunication

What separates us from animalsLove

The sparkPrevents the decay of society

Music & ArtLanguage is life for R – for Julie, art and music are symbolic of life. Of beauty, expression, the meaning of life.

Music and art are symbolic of what life can be, the good parts in life. For Julie, life is about more than surviving, life is about expression and communication. For her, her father and Perry may as well have been dead because they were as monotonous as R and the zombies in the airport. Their only focus was survival, not on appreciating life.

Your task: Find as many examples in the text of music or art being talked about that fits our symbolic meaning.

Music and art quotes“Music is life! It’s a physical emotion – you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and swtiched into sound waves for your ears to swallow”. P 53

“People used to say music was the great communicator.” p57

“Nora has a whole wall of Picassos in her room… we’d be legendary art theives if anyone still cared.” p 129When R uses music to convey his

emotions to Julie:Frank’s buttery baritone says it better than my croaky vocals ever could had I the diction of a Kennedy. I stand over the record, cutting and pasting the contents of my heart into an airborne collage. P 57

What would be the equivalent or music to Julie, language to R for you?

What thing in your life makes life worth living?

(This will be a good way for you to have a person response in your essays!)

Symbolism/setting

The Airport

The Stadium

What symbolism could these two locations have in the book?

Your task: Brainstorm in a group what you think one of the two settings could represent. As soon as you have one for each, send a runner up to write it up on the board. Once one idea is written up the next group cannot copy, so get in fast!

Think about what they represent to us now, and how Marion could be using it.

The AirportAirports to us are places of transition and change, places where we go literally take off and visit somewhere new. They are exciting and scary because at the other end of the flight we can be somewhere we have never been.

In Warm Bodies the airports are also places of transition but for a different purpose. They are in a transition state between life and death. Neither dead nor alive.

The zombies inhabiting the airport cannot take off, they are earth bound and lack purpose or direction. The airport is a symbolic holding pen, almost a

purgatory where they must wait out their days.

There is no movement within the airport itself. The zombies are stuck, stagnant. They ride escalators and moving walkways for fun, showing how lazy and apathetic they are. They cannot move themselves; they need machinery to do it for them.

It’s no coincedence that they return to the airport when they want to start the humanising revolution. It’s a place of flux, change, and unknown potential

AIRPORT EVIDENCE

To fix a problem that spans the globe, an airport seems like a good place to start. p 239

I ride the elevator several times a day, whenever they move. It’s become a ritual… I stand on the steps and ascend like a soul into Heaven, that sugary dream of our childhoods… p 5

R sleeps in a plane, instead of the airport like the other zombies….

What could Marion be saying?

The StadiumThe stadium is a place of stagnancy. It’s where humanity has holed itself up in order to survive, but it has become more of a prison than a home. Humanity has given up freedom in order to survive.

In this new home, life has no space or place for art, music or literature. The only thing that is valued is survival, and skills that help with that. It shows what happens you give up freedom for survival.

The Stadium also represents where we went wrong before the zombies. It’s a “monument” to our excesses and greed.

Stadium evidenceFrom the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float. But the interior reveals the Stadium’s soul: chaotic yet grasping for order, like the slums of Brazil if they’d been designed by a modernist architect p 117

Where we built our schools once we finally accepted this was reality, that this was the world our children would inherit. We taught them how to shoot, how to pour concrete, how to kill and how to survive, and if they made it that far, if they mastered those skills and had time to spare, then we taught them how to read and write, to reason and relate and understand the world. p120

“We think we’re surviving but we’re not”. p204

“Dad’s idea of saving humanity is building a really big concrete box, putting everybody in it and standing at the door with guns until we get old and die.” p 70

The Stadium rises on the horizon as the Dead stumble forward… a gaudy monument to an era of excess, a world of waste and want and misguided dreams that is now profoundly over. P 113

You will get an article on America post Sept 11. Read the article by yourself putting these codes beside it:

K – I Knew this alreadyN – This is New to me

D – I Don’t understand thisI – I found this Interesting

F – refers to people’s Freedoms being constricted

When you have finished turn to your neighbour and discuss what you think the writer’s point of view was.

NOW…. Why did I get you to read an article about September 11 in the middle of a zombie novel study?

Paragraph practicePick one of either the two symbols, or the two settings and write a paragraph using the SEXEXY structure to explain why this particular symbol or symbolic setting is important to our theme.

You can use the writing frame provided or go it alone.

S: The symbol/setting of _____________ is important in developing the idea of _______because……..

E: This is illustrated when_________

X: This example is effective in showing us the idea of _______ because………

E: This symbol is further developed when……….

X: This example is effective in showing us the idea of__________ because…………

Y: (Make a comment and try to link the ideas and symbols to reality – maybe whether this is true for you, or society etc)

Narrative perspectiveFirst person point of view

This technique is instrumental in developing our theme. As we talked about earlier, without it R would not be a fully rounded character and we would not hear his thoughts on humanity, survival, life and love.

Warm Bodies does something different than a typical zombie story. It subverts the genre and makes a zombie the narrator. Pretty much every other zombie story is told from the point of view of living people trying to survive (and clubbing zombies in the head while they're at it). The zombies are the Others, frightening and foreign. Julie explains it best when she says "We don't understand their thoughts so we assume they don't have any" (2.7.174). As a result, we humans do what we always do when we don't understand things: we shoot them.

But Warm Bodies shows us that some zombies, like R, our narrator, do have thoughts. And we're privy to them. As a result we kind of empathize with the guy. R is self-deprecating and as charming as a walking corpse can be.

What if Julie had narrated it?Take the passage on page 51 starting with “Later that evening we sit in the 747….” and ending on page 52 with “Is that when you died or something?”

Rewrite it as if it was in first person point of view by from Julie’s perspective.

Remember you won’t hear R’s thoughts, so whole sections of that text can be deleted. BUT… you will need to add what Julie sees, experiences and thinks.

Nb: While the story could have been told from a close 3rd person narrative using “he” and “she” it would not have allowed us the closeness to R to really see the world from his point of view.

What would we think of R if Marion had chosen to write it this way?

Rank this!As a technique Narrative Perspective allows you to give quotes that are not just dialogue based.

I will give you a sheet of important quotes from R’s perspective (his inner monologue).

Your task:

1. Rank them in order of how important they are in explaining our theme.

2. Explain for your top two what their effect is in terms of what they show us about our theme (hint: this is the sort of thing you would write in your essay in the “X” section of the paragraph).

3. Be prepared to justify your top choice to the class.

“I dream my necrotic cells shrugging off their lethargy, inflating and lighting up like Christmas deep in my core. Am I inventing all this…I feel the flatline of my existence disrupting, forming heartbeat hills and valleys.” P 47

“I don’t want to die again. This has become clearer and clearer to me recently, a desire so sharp and focused I can hardly believe it’s mine: I don’t want to die. I don’t want to disappear. I want to stay.” P 63

“I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.” P229

“We smile because this is how we will save the world. We will not let Earth become a tomb, a mass grave spinning through space. We will exhume ourselves. We will fight the curse and break it. We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.” P 239

“I want to change my punctuation. I long for punctuation but I’m drowning in ellipses.” P 50

Dialogue

“Obviously staying alive is pretty important… but there’s got to be something beyond that, right?”

“We think we’re surviving but we’re not”.

Your task: 1. Who said it? Match the dialogue with the person who said it.

2. Pick one piece of dialogue and explain what it show us.

“Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilisations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the point in anything?... That’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory – hope. So things that are gone can still matter”. "[A plant] is a meaningless

decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It's absurd to attach an emotion to something so brief and pointless."

“Music is life! It’s a physical emotion – you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and swtiched into sound waves for your ears to swallow”.

“Dead…. Want it to hurt… but doesn’t”.

Narrative perspective vs dialogue

Narrative perspective (can also be called inner monologue)

- Always from R’s perspective- Not things he has spoken but things

he has thought

Dialogue

- Something a character in the book has said out loud

- Can be any character, not just R- Tends to be Julie as she is the

biggest talker in the novel

Conditions of useIn Essays

Try not to use both narrative perspective and dialogue in the same essay. They are both good to use, but just try to use one of them. They are a good reliable

paragraph. But having two of them weakens your essay. Pair them with symbolism, allusion, imagery etc.

If you use them, you MUST memorise the quotes for your examples.

The theme for your essays

Life is about more than just survival

This covers ideas about freedom, music, language, art, and love.

It also links to other things like the stadium because the stadium shows us what happens when survival becomes the only focus.

What techniques can you write about for Warm Bodies essays?

Paragraph ideas