English CPT

              In the book Station Eleven, it starts off with a opening production of Shakespeare's King Lear in Toronto. Going into the start of the book, an actor Arthur Leander, is minutes away from his death. Arthur suffers a massive heart attack and Jeevan, a training paramedic comes in and tries to save Arthur’s life, but sadly minutes later Arthur had passed away. After a little bit, Jeevan gets a phone call from his friend, Hua, who alerts him to the pending outbreak of the Georgian Flu, which Hua think this will lead to a global epidemic. Global warming is one of many current issues in the world. In one of the book’s first scenes, a troupe of musicians and actors (the Traveling Symphony) is walking along an old road somewhere in Michigan, and it’s extremely hot, over a hundred degrees. Also, this is twenty years after civilization has died, which makes us wonder, will the world be any cooler by then? If all of our culture’s heat sources ceased functioning today, no more air conditioners emitting hot air, no more internal combustion engines, and no more factories blowing out smoke. How long would it take before there was a measurable cooling of the world’s climate? I think Station Eleven is giving us a “heads up” because I feel like this is going to happen to us in the future someday. The novel explores death both on a personal and global scale. On a personal level, the main characters of the novel are all connected to Arthur in some way. His on-stage death affects them all, whether because they witness it. As for Clark and Miranda, Arthur was such an important and complicated part of their lives; yet Arthur’s death is immediately followed by the Georgia Flu pandemic, in which billions of people die. Jeevan struggled in order to survive the Georgian Flu, and survived the post-collapse world. It was very hard for all the survivors, and the hardest part about this whole epidemic is that all the survivors will have to remember this terrible tragedy and will have to try and move on and forget what happened.