I Am Legend

Neville wakes the next morning and makes himself a list of tasks to stay on track. The weather is clear, so he can leave the house safely. He brings stakes and a mallet with him. Two Undead women lay on Neville’s lawn, killed by their own kind. He drives stakes into their chests, places them in the back of his station wagon, then takes them to the city’s mass grave, in which low embers are always burning. The grave had been built the previous year in 1975, and is where he was forced by authorities to bring his daughter Kathy after she was infected. Neville spends the afternoon going into neighboring houses and driving stakes into the chests of comatose Undead hiding from the sun.

Neville questions how he manages to stab the Undead’s hearts every time without strong anatomical knowledge (the implied solution of vampire legend). Neville’s father was a scientist and would have wanted him to devote more time to research and experimentation of the nature of the Undead, as he himself never believed them to be vampires—despite their hatred of garlic, mirrors, and the cross.

Neville spends the evening reading Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and comparing the nature of the Undead to the book’s vampires. The more whiskey he drinks, the more he questions why he has not died by suicide (perhaps by going out at night so the Undead kill him). After all, he lacks purpose and hope of finding other uninfected humans. In a fit of rage, Neville shatters his whiskey glass and cuts his hand. He bandages himself, continues drinking, and imagines himself giving a lecture on the vampire, wondering “is the vampire so bad? All he does is drink blood” (21). When he hears Ben Cortman calling for him, he almost leaves the house.

Neville oversleeps the next morning and wakes with a hangover. He is enraged to find that it is a cloudy day, but resolves to leave the house regardless of the threat. He does not bother locking the garage door when he leaves. Neville drives to the local cemetery to visit his wife, Virginia, in her coffin in the crypt. He is tormented by guilt over having followed governmental restrictions when his daughter Kathy died, having her burned in the mass grave instead of entombed like Virginia: “Why had he followed so blindly, listening to those fools who set up their stupid regulations during the plague?” (25). Inside the crypt, Neville finds an Undead man in his daytime coma, hiding from the sun. He furiously throws the Undead outside.

Several hours pass in which Neville sits beside Virginia’s coffin, ruminating on whether or not he could deliver her from death. When he leaves, he finds the Undead man destroyed and decomposing in the sunlight, as if he had been dead for days. He becomes excited at the prospect of dragging other Undead into the sunlight to destroy them instead of having to stake them. Neville knows there’s a difference between Undead and the alive but infected (simply called the “infected”), but doesn’t know how to distinguish it.

As an experiment, Neville drags an Undead woman from a nearby house into the sunlight. He watches as her body begins to decompose, but will only know if she is truly destroyed if she doesn’t wake up in the evening. He places her in his station wagon and begins driving home. Neville checks his watch to confirm he has enough time before sundown, but notices that it has stopped.

As the sun sets, Neville races back home, but arrives after the Undead have already gathered in front of his house. Some have entered through the unlocked garage door to break his generator. Neville drives through the crowd, pursued by Ben Cortman, until his car stalls. Ben Cortman reaches through the open window to attack Neville; Neville punches him and starts the car again, driving through the neighborhood with the Undead chasing him “like a pack of wolves” (33). Neville loses them, doubling back to the house and hastily parking on the lawn. Ben Cortman runs out of the garage and the two fight, with Neville barely able to hold him off. When the other Undead catch up, Neville fights his way back into the house and locks himself in.

Safe, though without electricity, Neville immediately begins drinking whiskey to calm his nerves. Through a peephole, he watches the Undead destroy his car with bricks and stones. Enraged, Neville opens the door long enough to shoot several Undead with his pistols. The infected die, while the Undead recover instantly. Neville locks the door.