For Tuesday: Mandel, Station Eleven, Chapters 1-12 (parts 1 and 2)

From the Station Eleven series (2021)

No questions for our first reading, but we will have an in-class response on Tuesday, so consider some of the following ideas as you read Chapters 1-12 (parts 1 & 2 of the book):

* The motto of the Traveling Symphony is "Because survival is insufficient." What do you think this means, especially given people in the Symphony and their mission in life? In a post-apocalyptic world, what else do you need?

* Related to the above, why do so few people desert the Symphony? Is it simply a matter of safety/survival? Or is there something else about the reality of Year Twenty?

* Do you find it strange that the Symphony travels around performing Shakespeare, of all things? What might make Shakespeare even more relevant in a world "after" the world than in our own present? In other words, why does Shakespeare persist?

* We got a master class in narration with The Turn of the Screw, and in this book, we get a third-person narrator but limited through many different perspectives. Why do you think we open in the 'past' with Jeevan's experiences? What does he show us that might become important later on?

* Chapter 6 is one of the scariest chapters in the book: how is society connected by a spider's web of necessities, luxuries, and conveniences, so that if one disappeared it would take dozens of others with it? How conscious of this are we on a day-to-day basis? 

* Why does the novel constantly go back and forth between the past and the present so often? And why is a novel uniquely qualified to do that, much more so than a movie, show, or a play? Why might novels really be the first 'time travelers' in our society?