94 pages • 3 hours read
Emily St. John MandelStation Eleven
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Theater”
Chapter 1 Summary
Actor Arthur Leander has a heart attack while performing the titular role in William Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, Canada. Jeevan Chaudhary, an audience member trained as a paramedic, rushes onto the stage to perform CPR; Arthur dies. Noticing her distress, Jeevan comforts Kirsten Raymonde, an eight-year-old girl who has a nonspeaking role in the play as one of Lear’s daughters.
Jeevan looks for his girlfriend in the lobby, but she is gone. As he walks, snow falls, reminding him of the fake snow that was falling on stage when Arthur died. He passes paparazzi outside the theater, who recognize him as a former colleague. Jeevan reflects on his decision to leave behind celebrity journalism to become a paramedic.
Chapter 2 Summary
At the bar inside the Elgin Theatre, staff and cast members involved in the production of King Lear discuss Arthur’s death. Together, they recall details of his life, including three marriages, three divorces, a son, Tyler, and his current affair with Tanya, who is responsible for King Lear’s child actors.
Elsewhere, Tanya watches Kirsten while trying to contact her parents. She gives her a paperweight to distract her.
Chapter 3 Summary
Jeevan wanders through Allan Gardens and decides to go see his brother Frank, who is paraplegic. As he walks, he receives a series of increasingly urgent calls from his friend Hua, a doctor. Hua tells Jeevan that an epidemic has broken out after several passengers on a flight from Moscow contracted a new, deadly, and highly infectious strain of flu called the “Georgia Flu,” after the country where it was first reported.
Jeevan purchases several carts’ worth of living essentials and takes them to Frank’s apartment. While checking out, he calls his girlfriend Laura and tells her to leave the city, but she thinks he is overreacting.
Chapter 4 Summary
At the theatre, the executive producer of King Lear calls Arthur’s lawyer to tell him of Arthur’s death. The lawyer reviews Arthur’s will before calling Clark Thompson, Arthur’s closest friend. The next morning, Clark begins calling Arthur’s former wives.
Chapter 5 Summary
Miranda Carroll, a shipping executive who was Arthur’s first wife, is on a business trip in Malaysia when she receives the call from Clark, who tells her about Arthur’s death. Miranda finds herself “soothed by the banality of it” (30).
Chapter 6 Summary
This chapter comprises “an incomplete list” of things that vanished due to the Georgia Flu (31), from electric lights and movies to medical support and aviation. Governments dissolve, and the Internet vanishes.
Part 1 Analysis
Part 1 centers on two main events: Arthur’s death and the pandemic that decimates the world’s population. By putting these events on center stage, Mandel situates and contextualizes everything that follows in relation to them: each of the main characters is connected with Arthur somehow, and all of the novel’s events are categorized according to a before/after dichotomy in relation to the outbreak. This allows for a close examination of Arthur’s life while highlighting the changes that the pandemic works upon the world. Striking as it is, the Georgia Flu outbreak differs from some apocalyptic events typical of the genre, since it is not the result of human activity, whether military or environmental. This shifts focus away from the event itself, which is apparently random, to the way that it changes the world and the lives of survivors.
The novel’s structure facilitates this examination of causes, effects, and character development. Many of the chapters are brief, switching freely between characters and timelines. Omniscient narration allows Mandel to intimately reveal characters’ innermost thoughts and foreshadow events unknown to characters. For instance, several times in Part 1, the narrator specifies in passing how much time a particular character has left to live, usually a matter of days or weeks. These references underscore how lucky the characters that survive are.
These chapters also initiate a thematic exploration of the relationship between art and life, as when Jeevan notes the similarities between real snow falling outside and the fake snow of the theater; he also thinks of disaster movies he has watched while stocking up on supplies. In each case, there is a sense of identification or similarity, as well as a sense of removal, an awareness that the one is not exactly like the other.
Related Titles
By Emily St. John Mandel
