50 pages • 1 hour read
George R. StewartEarth Abides
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Year 22”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
Ish struggles to educate the restless children—except for Joey, who thrives in the makeshift academic setting. Finding practical applications for their education is difficult since they have never known the world as it was. During one class session, Ish asks one of the children to bring him his hammer, but they seem afraid to touch it. Later, he realizes that they associate the hammer with the past, as though the tool were a mystical relic they are not allowed to touch. Pondering this idea, Ish wonders how their small, uneducated society could expect the children to distinguish superstition from truth. Ish realizes he has an opportunity to instill in the children a sense of tradition from the Old Times (religious, cosmological, cultural) so they don’t fall victim to new superstitions. He even considers destroying the hammer as a symbolic gesture, to show the children that it has no mystical power.
His thoughts return to Joey, who, in spite of his natural intelligence and problem-solving skills, has also grown conceited. Regardless, Ish still believes Joey to be best suited for the role of leader; but he is suddenly overcome by fear of Joey’s physical fragility. He must survive to help rebuild civilization.
As both an educated man and one who has lived through the Old Times, Ish feels the children regard him almost as a god, and he doesn’t know whether to admit the truth to them. One day, he asks the children how the world came about. They respond, “Why, the Americans made everything” (228). Wanting to disabuse them of any mythical reverence for “Americans,” Ish admits that he is one. They misinterpret, however: Because they see Ish as the keeper of knowledge, as almost superhuman, they assume that all Americans must likewise be superhuman.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
One afternoon, Richard and Robert return, and they bring another survivor, the large and powerful Charlie. Ish unconsciously resents the stranger’s intrusion into their insular group. Even Ezra, normally the convivial one, seems suspicious of the newcomer. Robert offers only a vague account of Charlie, reporting that they picked him up in Los Angeles and that he’s a “fine person” and an amusing storyteller (though Ish immediately worries that Charlie’s stories would be prurient or involve obscenities). Later, they gather around a bonfire, and Richard and Robert recall their journey: They encountered a few scattered communities, they found no corn or wheat growing in the Great Plains, and Chicago was a ghost town. Ish is reassured to hear that a few other communities have taken root.
Ish, Charlie, and several others retire to Ish’s house, where they probe Charlie for background information. As Charlie talks, Ish loosens up, feeling that perhaps the newcomer isn’t so bad after all. Ezra, meanwhile, complains of chills, so they build up the fire. It’s just a ruse on Ezra’s part, though, to see if the heat will cause Charlie to remove his vest (Ezra believes he’s hiding a gun). Ezra, like Ish, feels conflicted about Charlie.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
That night, for the first time since the plague, Ish locks his doors. He fears Charlie might fracture the group’s fragile unity, and he foresees a one-on-one confrontation between himself and the stranger. The following morning, Ish, feeling defenseless and alone, checks on Charlie and the children. He brings his hammer. He finds them seated by the ashes of the bonfire, Charlie and Evie sitting uncomfortably close. Ish approaches, but Charlie, in a gesture of “open defiance,” puts his arm around her. Ish dismisses the children. This is the confrontation he’s been expecting. He tells Charlie to stay away from Evie because the Tribe doesn’t need the “kind” of children Evie would bear. Charlie refuses to back off, and Ish walks away, feeling Charlie has won this round.
He tells Emma of the encounter, and she advises him to gather support from Ezra and George and the older boys. As they debate the matter, Ish feels the group is largely in favor of Charlie’s presence—until Ezra tells them that Charlie recently drunkenly boasted about having several sexually transmitted infections (STIs). They decide Charlie must go, but they are stymied by the lack of law enforcement or a functioning justice system, so they vote—banishment or death. Charlie has a gun, so banishing him would not be effective, as he could easily return or become violent. The vote is unanimous: death.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
They hang Charlie from a tree and bury him far from the community. With Charlie’s death, Ish feels they have lost their collective innocence and crossed into authoritarianism. He finds it bitterly ironic that he, an over-thinker, has survived when leadership requires action. He examines a box of corn kernels the boys brought back from an Indigenous American community, living seed they might plant after so many years of procrastination. Despite its value, Ish roasts some of the corn—a staple of frontiersmen from generations past—as a history lesson for Joey.
One day, Robert falls ill. Ish gives him “sulfa pills” (for treating bacterial infection), but illness is so rare among the Tribe that diagnosis and treatment are difficult. One by one, the group succumbs to what Ish believes is typhoid fever, and he suspects Charlie may have been the carrier. Now in the full grip of an epidemic, and without natural immunity, they fear death may sweep through their small community. Ish is infected, but Emma is spared, and her strength of spirit sustains the group. In the end, five children die, including Joey.
Part 2, Chapters 5-8 Analysis
After 21 years of complacent isolation, the outside world finally intrudes. Richard and Robert return from their cross-country trek with Charlie, a charismatic stranger who charms all group members but Ish and Ezra. In contrast to the initial coalescence of the Tribe, which was gradual and where everyone got to know each other slowly, Charlie’s arrival is sudden and intrusive. Up to this point, the novel’s tone has been subdued, but the mood takes an ominous turn with Charlie’s appearance. By comparison to the Tribe’s fairly placid existence, the arrival of a stranger who simply seems suspicious is enough to create narrative tension.
When he reveals himself to be a sexual predator and carrier of STIs, the Tribe confronts a dire moral dilemma: Without any institutional law enforcement or justice system, they must act as both judge and jury. Ish realizes the danger here—any group that takes justice into its own hands, regardless of its noble intentions, may be little more than a vigilante mob. Any pretense that Ish may have of “civilization” and “society” among the group is threatened the moment they vote to execute Charlie. Societies ordain presumably wise individuals with the power of life and death in these matters, but the question is whether Ish, Ezra, George, and the rest have the moral authority to create their own makeshift justice system.
Charlie’s appearance represents a challenge to Ish’s leadership, and the subplot that culminates in Charlie’s killing is a key moment in the novel. As the members of the Tribe debate—and Ish reflects upon—the nature of law and its origins, their right to kill Charlie in the name of some abstract principle of justice, and so on, the novel foregrounds the theme of The Ambivalence of Power/Mastery. Ish, for example, rationalizes their choice by arguing that the risk of doing nothing is too great, and therefore, the sacrifice of one man is for the greater good.
Ironically, Charlie’s execution is ritualistic, reintroducing the theme of Civilization Versus Atavism. The hanging is a communal affair with all the men in attendance to mark the occasion and bear witness to their collective decision. It would have been much easier to simply shoot him, but Ish realizes that Charlie’s death requires the practiced formality of a ritual: Ritual can lend order to otherwise unruly psychological realities, and such organizing measures are often considered a cornerstone of “civilization”: While it would have been expedient to immediately end Charlie with a bullet, the more ceremonious execution superficially restrains that murderous impulse and enforces form onto its chaotic energy, thus imbuing the murder with an outward air of dignity and even transcendence from the actual, base reality. This semblance of propriety is partly the Tribe’s attempt at maintaining a respectable self-image, yet they cannot fully deceive themselves of what’s transpired.
Through Charlie’s death, Stewart contemplates a wide variety of issues: morality, political philosophy, crime and punishment, and religion. In the absence of political institutions, Ish ponders how the Tribe may be most efficiently organized, and decisions are often democratically decided. Charlie’s execution is the subject of much moral handwringing: “That their society might have to inflict such a final penalty, the very thought was strangely disturbing to all their minds” (253). They even attempt to organize religious services, but the group’s diversity of beliefs quickly ends the practice. While humanity in such circumstances may be too focused on food and shelter to vigorously debate such heady topics, Stewart uses his tale of humanity eclipsed by disease to ponder these ideas and to even question the validity of civilization itself.
After Charlie’s death, nature presents them with a new crisis: The Tribe has not known sickness for 20 years, so when typhoid hits, they are caught unprepared. Once again, Stewart alludes to the human propensity for being caught unaware. Ish regrets all the years he could have been reading medical books but didn’t. He wishes he had foreseen such an outbreak, but two decades of good health have lulled him into a false sense of security. He berates himself for behavior that is intrinsically human, but his need to be all things to all people precludes self-forgiveness; the protagonist’s dilemma again highlights an ambivalence toward positions of power. For so long, Ish has placed his hopes for the future on Joey’s tiny shoulders, and now that the boy is dead from typhoid, Ish assumes that responsibility himself once again. For Ish, his education is both a blessing and a curse. His knowledge gives him authority within the group, but it also saddles him with more responsibility than one man should be forced to carry.
