Shaun The Dead Sparknotes
Through the inspiration of many zombie films, books, and other forms of media combined with his influence of the literary genre Whitehead was so known for, we see a new form erupt in front of our eyes. This inspiration from other artists of the zombie genre has been picked and placed within different parts of his novel and then turned into something that in itself is no longer just a novel about zombies. Through the exploration of the zombie trope, I can reveal light on how this novel destroys the form which we have come, as fans of the cliché, to love so dearly and recreate what can now be found in future takes. One notable feature of the novel is the main character Mark Spitz during a rebuilding of Zone One. Unlike many characters in zombie fiction, Mark Spitz takes on the role of mediocrity. Many well-known characters of the zombie genre had something big or special about them. “Resident Evil” had the rough-tough butt kicking police character able to take on an entire army with just a pistol in hand and I am Legend contained a sole survivor and bearer of the cure for humanity. However, Mark Spitz
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was the average person as “he staked out the B or the B chose him” in school thus breaking the basic unspoken rules of the main character (Whitehead 11). That is not to say the average person isn’t found in the genre.
Usually when one is an average person though it is used in satire of some sort. “Shaun of the Dead” is first to come to mind as the main character Shaun was just an average man who argued whether a gun in a pub was loaded or not and spent the rest of his time playing video games in his house. Nothing was special about him at all yet he survived the zombie apocalypse through humor and just wanting to go to the pub. Another work within the genre would be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which turns the character Elizabeth into a zombie fighting machine mixed with the love interests of the original book. Although not as average as the character Shaun, she does not possess the brilliance of characters who survive on their own as the only one with a cure or single handedly taking on an entire horde of
zombies. Above all, when it comes to Mark Spitz as a character one thing sticks clear which is his race. Unlike so many books, films, and video games within the genre there have been people of color as side characters but Colson Whitehead takes this trope by the horns and destroys it with his non ethnic mentioned character. With the hints provided for us, we are shown Mark Spitz ethnicity such as his name is based on the black athlete that he did not understand at first thus “he had to look it up” and was confused on the reason for the name as he could swim but wasn’t gold medal material at all. His name is almost a tongue in cheek in the sense that it is “for reasons that have mordant fun with a well-known racial myth” that was believed to be fact by one of Spitz’s companions who gave him the nickname (Beck 35). Then there is the “meat” of the genre, the zombie. In many works the zombie is never given a name or is given one that does that resemble the term “zombie” whatsoever. According to Swanson “zombies, as contagious antisubjects, not only kill characters, they produce more anticharacters” when he defines what the zombie in many works are (Swanson 8). These zombies are just a mindless horde with no names to faces. Within Zone One however, I believe the zombies are not anticharacters at all but rather characters in their own right with faces and names that our main character has gifted them each.
Some of these zombies are still performing the duties they had when they were alive such as their daily career.
“The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur” (Whitehead 80).
With just this sentence alone it would seem it was just a psychiatrist awaiting their patient but with the entire passage before and after you begin to see that these are skels in their positions in life they had always taken. Only this time it was truly a lifeless task to perform day in and day out but the zombies body had memorized the activity so well that it was natural to do this rather than roam the streets for their next kill. This gives the zombies the blank slate of side characters with no true background and are there to fill the empty space a writer needs to make the environment seem more “human” but does not dehumanize the roll of the side character.
Rather this gives the skels their own life and face rather than being another monster in the crowd as Swanson states within his paper. Thus Colson once again destroys the cliché of the genre by destroying the idea of a giant mass of flesh and bones charging at a person to Mark Spitz who “took them all down” with the black sedan. By giving the skels names to go by and his mediocrity Spitz has completely redefined what it means to be the main character of a novel containing a sea of the undead. He has become “the modernist antihero cum superhero, his power the mediocrity that renders him perfectly suited to the post-Last Night world” leaving the entire novel featuring anti everything (Hoberek 40).
Thus we are left with no longer the past and present but the future. The babies even diverted survivors from delight in the discovery of the latest kill field, that phenomenon encountered with increase regularity, the mystery that pointed to an ebbing of the plague” (51). Children in today's society are born every day. When one is born in a hospital you can hear the sound of a lullaby echoing through the entire hospital as everyone has a moment of silence and happiness encompass them. However, this is a completely different environment than our own as these children become survivors of their own illnesses and can pull through despite many adults dying around them. Although one child was fully healthy from everything, for the most part, the other two were still not fully recovered with one not responsive and the other with a heart problem. They brushed these ideas to the side however at the idea of three children entering this world now. This was a sign that what was deemed as the end of society as we knew it was now having a beacon of hope for a future of new humans to venture through the world. Without the corruptness of the current world. Without the brainwashing. They were a new generation with new hopes that were still pure in the eyes of those who had survived. For just that brief moment the world was no longer hell. For that moment, everyone was to be gifted a face from the undead to the newly born.
Mark Spitz, an average black male in a world that is not average. However after so much monotony in the new world it has become average. It is no longer a place to think of danger but to imagine boredom. To miss the simple foods and activities in life. To want to stand in line at a bank or eat cilantro. Yet it belongs in the zombie genre for the antagonist being a creature of the undead. A weak antagonist as even the mediocre seems to creep in more to attack Spitz than any other skel attack.
So with his use of satire that can be taken seriously, Colson Whitehead can be considered a new founder of the Zombie genre by destroying what was once considered cannon and creating a new cannon. One that had zombies still but their portrayal was that of a character and the characters given a realistic goal. He no longer holds the ideal of all one can think of is survival and makes it mediocre life filled with armadillo faces and other propaganda for the selling of items. It is a tale of anti-zombies, anti-characterization, and anti-cliché. Children are a blessing but also not so much that it takes over the entire novel. It is an ode to his childhood around the genre and now a new ode to gore.
was the average person as “he staked out the B or the B chose him” in school thus breaking the basic unspoken rules of the main character (Whitehead 11). That is not to say the average person isn’t found in the genre.
Usually when one is an average person though it is used in satire of some sort. “Shaun of the Dead” is first to come to mind as the main character Shaun was just an average man who argued whether a gun in a pub was loaded or not and spent the rest of his time playing video games in his house. Nothing was special about him at all yet he survived the zombie apocalypse through humor and just wanting to go to the pub. Another work within the genre would be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which turns the character Elizabeth into a zombie fighting machine mixed with the love interests of the original book. Although not as average as the character Shaun, she does not possess the brilliance of characters who survive on their own as the only one with a cure or single handedly taking on an entire horde of
zombies. Above all, when it comes to Mark Spitz as a character one thing sticks clear which is his race. Unlike so many books, films, and video games within the genre there have been people of color as side characters but Colson Whitehead takes this trope by the horns and destroys it with his non ethnic mentioned character. With the hints provided for us, we are shown Mark Spitz ethnicity such as his name is based on the black athlete that he did not understand at first thus “he had to look it up” and was confused on the reason for the name as he could swim but wasn’t gold medal material at all. His name is almost a tongue in cheek in the sense that it is “for reasons that have mordant fun with a well-known racial myth” that was believed to be fact by one of Spitz’s companions who gave him the nickname (Beck 35). Then there is the “meat” of the genre, the zombie. In many works the zombie is never given a name or is given one that does that resemble the term “zombie” whatsoever. According to Swanson “zombies, as contagious antisubjects, not only kill characters, they produce more anticharacters” when he defines what the zombie in many works are (Swanson 8). These zombies are just a mindless horde with no names to faces. Within Zone One however, I believe the zombies are not anticharacters at all but rather characters in their own right with faces and names that our main character has gifted them each.
Some of these zombies are still performing the duties they had when they were alive such as their daily career.
“The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur” (Whitehead 80).
With just this sentence alone it would seem it was just a psychiatrist awaiting their patient but with the entire passage before and after you begin to see that these are skels in their positions in life they had always taken. Only this time it was truly a lifeless task to perform day in and day out but the zombies body had memorized the activity so well that it was natural to do this rather than roam the streets for their next kill. This gives the zombies the blank slate of side characters with no true background and are there to fill the empty space a writer needs to make the environment seem more “human” but does not dehumanize the roll of the side character.
Rather this gives the skels their own life and face rather than being another monster in the crowd as Swanson states within his paper. Thus Colson once again destroys the cliché of the genre by destroying the idea of a giant mass of flesh and bones charging at a person to Mark Spitz who “took them all down” with the black sedan. By giving the skels names to go by and his mediocrity Spitz has completely redefined what it means to be the main character of a novel containing a sea of the undead. He has become “the modernist antihero cum superhero, his power the mediocrity that renders him perfectly suited to the post-Last Night world” leaving the entire novel featuring anti everything (Hoberek 40).
Thus we are left with no longer the past and present but the future. The babies even diverted survivors from delight in the discovery of the latest kill field, that phenomenon encountered with increase regularity, the mystery that pointed to an ebbing of the plague” (51). Children in today's society are born every day. When one is born in a hospital you can hear the sound of a lullaby echoing through the entire hospital as everyone has a moment of silence and happiness encompass them. However, this is a completely different environment than our own as these children become survivors of their own illnesses and can pull through despite many adults dying around them. Although one child was fully healthy from everything, for the most part, the other two were still not fully recovered with one not responsive and the other with a heart problem. They brushed these ideas to the side however at the idea of three children entering this world now. This was a sign that what was deemed as the end of society as we knew it was now having a beacon of hope for a future of new humans to venture through the world. Without the corruptness of the current world. Without the brainwashing. They were a new generation with new hopes that were still pure in the eyes of those who had survived. For just that brief moment the world was no longer hell. For that moment, everyone was to be gifted a face from the undead to the newly born.
Mark Spitz, an average black male in a world that is not average. However after so much monotony in the new world it has become average. It is no longer a place to think of danger but to imagine boredom. To miss the simple foods and activities in life. To want to stand in line at a bank or eat cilantro. Yet it belongs in the zombie genre for the antagonist being a creature of the undead. A weak antagonist as even the mediocre seems to creep in more to attack Spitz than any other skel attack.
So with his use of satire that can be taken seriously, Colson Whitehead can be considered a new founder of the Zombie genre by destroying what was once considered cannon and creating a new cannon. One that had zombies still but their portrayal was that of a character and the characters given a realistic goal. He no longer holds the ideal of all one can think of is survival and makes it mediocre life filled with armadillo faces and other propaganda for the selling of items. It is a tale of anti-zombies, anti-characterization, and anti-cliché. Children are a blessing but also not so much that it takes over the entire novel. It is an ode to his childhood around the genre and now a new ode to gore.