Holding Out Hope
Zone One is a novel that ends without solid answers. Its author, Colson Whitehead said as much in an interview with The Atlantic: “it's definitely open to interpretation” (Colson Whitehead on Zombies, 'Zone One,' and His Love of the VCR). Does Mark survive? Is humanity wiped out once and for all?
As I was looking around to see what others have written about Zone One, I came across this ending quote of an article from last October:
“Even when all seems lost, the trick, it seems, is to keep fighting for life, for a future. This is one of those novels that will help you feel like such a thing is possible” (Why Now is a Great Time to Read Colson Whitehead's Zone One).
I stopped and reread that line because it didn’t seem to match with my sense of hopelessness after finishing the novel. Mark Spitz’s past shows us over and over than something always goes wrong in each of the human groups or settlements, that the walls always come down. That certainly seems hopeless.
But. Just as the barricade comes down at the novel’s end, Mark becomes reenergized, as if the multitude of the dead give him life. And we know that Mark has always lived to tell the stories of the walls failing, the friend groups crumbling.
So maybe that is where the hope comes through, in the inexplicable survival of Mark Spitz. Especially Mark, the most average of characters, as Whitehead makes sure we understand.
The ending crushes the hopes that Buffalo has to rebuild, to bring New York back to what it used to be. But Mark never focuses on the future, not allowing himself to believe there will be a return to normal. So while the ending is not hopeful for the government’s vision of a rebuilt future, it is hopeful for Mark’s vision of adapting.
To this point, Leif Sorensen, an English professor, writes, “Mark Spitz’s narrative does not hinge on a moment in which society can return to its previous heights. It is a narrative of becoming, in which humanity must adapt to a hostile, potentially post-human world” (Against the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead's "Zone One").
I’d like to think that Mark Spitz makes it out of New York that Sunday. Maybe he can teach other survivors to hope the way he does, in the mediocre yet strong.
