The Girl with All the Gifts

“Maybe if they all pretend not to notice, Liam and Marcia will be wheeled in one day and it will be like they never went away. But if anyone asks, ‘Where did they go to?’ then they’ll really be gone and she’ll never see them again.” 

After Liam and Marcia, two kids in Melanie’s class, are taken away to Dr. Caldwell’s lab, Melanie worries that they’ll never return. Melanie deals with her anxiety the way any normal child might: denial. She imagines that pretending it never happened will negate its reality—a kind of magical thinking common to those dealing with trauma. Melanie’s use of a coping mechanism to avoid confronting the unimaginable is a sign of her burgeoning self-awareness.

“Subject number twenty-two, whose name was Liam if you accept the idea of giving these things a name, continues to stare at her, his eyes tracking her movements.” 

In her cold and clinical inner voice, Caldwell makes mental notes about the child she is currently dissecting. She goes to great lengths to convince herself that Liam is not a real boy but simply a dead shell hosting a parasite that animates his movements. Her self-persuasion—a routine she wouldn’t go through dissecting a frog—indicates that somewhere beneath her dispassionate exterior is an empathetic human. Her work, however, requires that she shove her empathy to the side and tell herself stories about how these children are not really children at all.

“The fact that they can talk may make them easier to empathise with, but it also makes them very much more dangerous than the animalistic variety we usually encounter.”

Caldwell and Justineau debate the value of the children’s lives. Justineau argues that their emotional and cognitive functions make them worthy of moral consideration; Caldwell, however, counters that their hunger response makes them something else entirely. While she understands Justineau’s feelings (perhaps she secretly shares them), she expects her to bury them as effectively as she, Caldwell, has. An inquisitive and emotional hungry is still a hungry, after all, and one that is more dangerous because of its intelligence and ability to evoke sympathy.

“Hunger is bending Melanie’s spine like Achilles bending his bow. And Miss Justineau will be her bread.” 

The first time Melanie feels her hunger response is in the presence of Justineau. It is a shocking moment for readers, who have only previously witnessed Melanie’s curiosity and innocence; the temptation to attack even her most beloved teacher is so powerful that Melanie can only escape by screaming at Justineau to leave. Justineau is equally shocked, her entire worldview about Melanie compromised. For the first time, she must protect herself rather than the children.

“She’s lived in Plato’s cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she’s been turned around to face the fire.” 

When Melanie sees the outside world for the first time, the sensory experience is overpowering. The sights, smells, and sounds fill her senses until she can only express herself with nonverbal sounds. Carey uses the allegory of Plato’s cave to illustrate the moment. Like Plato’s prisoners chained inside a cave and seeing only shadows of real life, Melanie’s life up to this point has been shallow and two-dimensional. Appropriately, Carey symbolizes her awakening with “facing the fire”—the very element of nature she later uses to release the spores and eradicate the human race in favor of a new species. 

“It’s still wet with morning dew, cold against her ankles. The ordinariness of that feeling is like a telegram from the other side of the world.” 

Amid the chaos of the zombie and junker attack on the base, the feeling of damp grass on Justineau’s ankles cuts through the terror. It is a brief, comforting sense memory that recalls not only place but time—a place, perhaps, where dewy grass represents childhood, innocence, home, and a time before the Breakdown. 

“He’s never seen a hungry in a meat frenzy and not acting on it. It’s a novelty, but he’s not going to bet his life on it being a long-term trend.” 

As the Hotel Echo survivors pile into the Humvee to escape the attack, Parks sees a cornered and blood-smeared Melanie crouching in the back. Justineau assures him that Melanie is not a threat. Indeed, a normal hungry would be in a feeding frenzy by now, but Melanie resists the urge. That unconventional behavior gives Parks pause just long enough for Justineau to let her out into the wild and away from the others. Melanie’s restraint may be the first shadow of doubt implanted into Parks’s mind, causing him to question his prior assumptions about the girl.

“The air is heavy with scents. Melanie knows that some of them are the scents of the flowers, but even the air seems to have a smell—earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living and things dying and things long dead. The smell of a world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.” 

Having escaped the attack on the base, Melanie takes a few precious moments to breathe in the cornucopia of scents the world offers. She communes with the sights, smells, and sounds like “a static atom in a sea of change” (125). Along with the sensory input comes an inexorable momentum—a feeling of movement and change. Accustomed to the stasis of her cell, Melanie finds that the outside world is a place of cycles: the cycle of air and water, of youth replacing age, and of life and death. Ultimately, humankind must surrender to the cycles of nature as well, dying out so the second generation can take their place.

“And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.” 

On the run in a broken-down Humvee, Melanie thinks about her future and if it will include Miss Justineau or a place to call home. Her only home up until now has been her cell, but it was her own, and the pleasure of Justineau’s classroom made it all worth it. With an uncertain future, Melanie knows that she and her teacher are bound to each other out of necessity. If Melanie is to have any kind of home, she doesn’t care where it is as long as Miss Justineau is there.

“And the dead kids drag at every living soul. A weight of guilt you haul around with you like the moon hauls the ocean, too massive to lift and too much a part of you to ever let it go.” 

When the Humvee breaks down and the survivors are forced to walk to Beacon across 70 miles of hungry-infested territory, Justineau thinks about all the children who have died of everything from war to disease to domestic abuse. The numbers are too staggering to accept, so she forgives herself “the way everybody else does” (152). Justineau’s guilt, however, is not collective but singular; the countless and unfathomable numbers of dead children serve as a proxy for the one dead child Justineau struck with her car and left by the side of the road. 

“Autocannibalism is an eminently practical strategy for a parasite to which the host’s body is only a temporary vector.” 

Caldwell examines a hungry in the Stevenage hospital who exhibits uncharacteristic behavior: He sings and leafs through old photos. He also bears bite marks that she hypothesizes may be self-inflicted. The strange and graphic image of a parasite compelling its host to devour itself is horrible, but Caldwell copes the only way she knows how—clinically. She explains the behavior in a detached tone, almost admiring the pathogen’s survival techniques. Lost in her reverie is any empathy for the hungry, once a patient in the hospital, who has probably never left his room since being infected and will never see the person in the photos again. 

“Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself—that you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they’re something different than they are.” 

Although Melanie has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of hardship and trauma, Justineau feels compelled to sugarcoat the recent past to shelter Melanie from further psychological damage. Justineau still sees Melanie as a child who needs adult protection, but Melanie sees through this. She has the insight to understand the linguistic subtleties at work: that words have power, and that sometimes adults modify or censor their words because they fear that they may harm a child. Melanie, however, has been through enough trauma already. Words are no threat to her. She is able to step outside the situation and analyze Justineau’s coping strategy—an impressive feat for a 10-year-old girl.

“Only the twisted line of her mouth shows. It reminds him, right then, of the line of his scar.” 

When Justineau confesses to Parks that she killed a young boy in a hit-and-run accident, Parks sees in her face a similarity to his own. Adversaries for so long, they suddenly find common ground in the darkness of their pasts. Parks has committed his fair share of sins, not the least of which is his rough treatment and subjugation of the children. As a soldier, he has certainly also killed. Justineau’s confession implies that the two, seemingly miles apart in nature and ethics, are not so different after all. They both bear the physical evidence to prove it. 

“I’d come back because I want to. Because I’m with you, not with them. And there isn’t any way to be with them, even if I wanted to […] They’re not with each other. Not ever.” 

When Melanie offers to lure the hungries away from the hospital in Stevenage so the others can escape, Parks is skeptical, forcing Melanie to defend her plan. In doing so, Melanie asserts her autonomy and free will. She is more than a pack animal driven by hunger. She has more evolved needs that place her a rung above the other hungries on the emotional/cognitive ladder—in particular, the need for love and friendship and community. She also demands respect for both her motives and her loyalty. If she says she’ll return, she wants to be taken at her word. 

“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.” 

After seeing the burn shadows of a parent and child, Melanie glimpses beyond their deaths to the richness of their lives, and she imagines herself in their place. She is mature enough to understand that families, like everything else in the world, involve both darkness and light. Gallagher’s family is a prime example of the darkness, while Melanie’s bond with Justineau suggests the beauty of family. Unlike many adults, Melanie has no problem accepting life’s complex dualities.

“She’s starting to make connections that build outwards from her own existence in some surprising and scary directions.” 

When Justineau tells Melanie about efforts to control the infection in its early days, she claims that many mistakes were made: Those in charge were caught off-guard and often didn’t know what they were doing, and in some cases the cure was worse than the disease. As Melanie tries to process this information, she contemplates her own nature and her status as a feared and hated hungry, but she also understands that what Caldwell is doing is as wrong as those initial efforts to stem the epidemic. She begins to see the world in all its vast, interconnected complexity. The connections she’s building are the beginnings of critical thinking, a skill she will use to make decisions that affect all of humanity. 

“Gallagher is a squatter in the ruins of empire, but he doesn’t interrogate the ruins any more than you’d interrogate the meat you eat to try to guess what animal it came from. Most of the time it’s better not to know.” 

In his young life, Gallagher has known only the post-Breakdown world: Beacon and Hotel Echo. As he and the other survivors traverse the ruined landscape, he encounters relics of the past. Many of these relics are a part of his daily routine—his weapons, the buildings on the military base, the furniture—but some, like a double-decker bus, are not. Like many people in the real world, Gallagher uses these artifacts but doesn’t show much curiosity about their origins. History is often the purview of the older generation, and Gallagher lives in the present. With so little of his own life in the past, the history of the world carries no relevance for him. 

“Of course, that’s only a conceptual stone’s throw from the thought that her survival is a side effect of mediocrity.”

Stumbling across the abandoned mobile lab Rosie triggers a wave of anger and humiliation in Caldwell. Once in the running for a coveted spot conducting important field research, Caldwell was ultimately crossed off the list. The paradox is that losing a place on the team probably saved her life; the other members of Rosie’s crew are lost and presumably dead. That thought, however, is cold comfort for Caldwell, for whom reputation is everything. Her peers didn’t consider her worthy, and that matters more than her life.

“It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else.” 

On foraging patrol with Justineau, Gallagher is stupefied by the sheer number of material possessions he sees in people’s homes. As a child of the Breakdown (and the military), he knows only spartan living. He tries to process this hoarder mentality, surmising that people used possessions to remake themselves, as if acquiring more objects could alter your identity from the outside in. He doesn’t know how accurate his observations are; Carey uses his post-apocalypse environment to make wry observations about our world today. 

“‘It meant something to her,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what, but unless I’m dead wrong, it’s something she’s way too scared to talk about. I didn’t push her, because I don’t have a bastard clue what kind of something that might be.’” 

In terms of character evolution, Parks undergoes one of the most profound. In the beginning, he treats the children like the monsters he assumes them to be, strapping them in their chairs at gunpoint and wheeling them to Caldwell’s lab for dissection without a second thought. Long-term exposure to Melanie slowly changes him from someone who would just as soon shoot her to someone who tiptoes gingerly around her fragile emotions. He understands that she has seen something important, and his strategy to find out the truth is empathy instead of brute force. His motivation may be self-preservation, but he certainly sees the young girl as an asset rather than a threat—as a “she” rather than an “it.”

“‘I started to cry,’ Melanie says. ‘Not because I was sad, but because I didn’t know if I was sad or not.’”

As Melanie recounts the story of the children in the theater and the compelling sense of community they share, she struggles to process her emotional response to it. While she wants to be part of a family of her own kind, she also understands that without the experience of Hotel Echo, she never would have met Justineau. The emotional tug-of-war triggers an outburst of tears—a nostalgia for a world she’s never known but can imagine herself a part of balanced against a life of hardship and cruelty but with a single glowing beacon, Miss Justineau. 

“We have to bury him. Or dogs and other hungries will get him and eat even more of him. And there won’t be anywhere to show where he died. You should honour a fallen soldier, Sergeant!” 

When Parks, Justineau, and Melanie discover Gallagher’s remains, Parks’s impulse is to abandon the body, but Melanie insists they honor his death with a proper burial. Justineau’s lessons about mythology and the Trojan War still fresh in her mind, Melanie’s response is the principled one literature idealizes. Even a hardened soldier like Parks cannot ignore her emotional appeal. Melanie’s reprimand shakes him out of his cynicism, at least for a moment, and pushes him to do the right and honorable thing.

“It’s not as though she wants to commit what more or less amounts to murder. But her hypothesis is so huge in its implications that to shrink from murder would be a crime against humanity.” 

Caldwell is so laser-focused on discovering a cure for the pathogen—and by extension on securing her reputation—that she locks Melanie, Justineau, and Parks out of Rosie, condemning Justineau and Parks at least to certain death. Her end-justifies-the-means logic is characteristic; it is the same logic that she uses to justify the dissection of children. Utilitarian philosophy, which argues that the morally correct choice “produces the greatest good for the greatest number” would agree with her (“Utilitarianism.” Ethics Unwrapped. University of Texas at Austin, 2021, utexas.edu.). Caldwell’s research stands to benefit all of humanity, and she would presumably suggest that sacrificing a few infected test subjects—or innocent bystanders—is worth that payoff.