Disability and Visions of Apocalypse

There’s a sentiment often expressed in the philosophy behind disability advocacy that disability is a social construct. You’re only disabled if your society is not built to accommodate you. In a completely wheelchair-accessible world, using a wheelchair would not be a disability; conversely, in a world without glasses, poor eyesight would be a severe disability, and at its extremes, it would be functionally equivalent to being actually blind. Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven does not linger on its disabled characters, but their depiction in the small amount of page time they are granted suggests something that I believe is ultimately narrow-minded and incorrect: there is no place for disability in the apocalypse, and still very little in the post-apocalypse. Through the characters of Frank Chaudhary, Lily Patterson, and the unnamed, “nearly-blind” seventh guitar, Mandel paints a far bleaker future for disabled people than the rest of humanity, a choice that unnecessarily minimizes their roles and the roles of all disabled people in her world. There can be space for disability in the post-apocalypse, and Mandel’s refusal to envision such a thing is a rare failure of imagination in an otherwise insightful, imaginative work.

Frank Chaudhary and Lily Patterson, the novel’s two named disabled characters, have disabilities that present very differently in the pre-apocalypse. Frank is unable to walk due to a spinal cord injury and must use a wheelchair (Mandel 26), while Lily is depressed and on medication to stabilize her mood, an accommodation capable of being provided by her society which ultimately leaves her functionally abled, at least in the pre-apocalyptic world (239-240). Once the Georgia Flu arrives and society collapses, both of their disabilities become insurmountable obstacles to their very existence. Both Frank and Lily commit suicide within the first few months of the pandemic; for Frank, it is a calculated decision as he knows his wheelchair will be useless in the devastated city crammed with stopped cars and clogged with unplowed snow and he doesn’t wish to wait in his apartment to starve to death (183, 189). Lily’s motivations are less clear but appear to stem from her poor mental state and worsened acuity for decision making as a result of going off her antidepressants (242, 245). Nonetheless, the result is the same. The world of the apocalypse can not support or accommodate either person’s disability, even the girl who had been functionally abled in the pre-apocalypse world. Therefore they can no longer live. 

These are two out of the novel’s three disabled characters, and the only ones granted names, more than a paragraph of description, or any degree of impact on the plot—although even Lily’s impact is slim. The abled characters don’t encounter disabled people in any of the settlements they pass through in Year 20 (passim). What are we to assume happened to them? We’ve seen the fate of the disabled in Frank and Lily. Extrapolation is easy from there.

In general, the apocalypse Mandel depicts is associated with walking for the abled characters who lived through it. Kirsten Raymonde states that she walked for most of her childhood (61), a sentiment echoed in the experiences of many of those who lived through the collapse of society. Is there a place, then, for someone who cannot walk? Frank certainly didn’t believe so. In a similar vein, what place is there for someone who cannot see, in a world where you must forage your own food, gather supplies, and travel constantly through unfamiliar and dangerous territory? The character of the seventh guitar serves to provide Mandel’s answer. It's not, to me, a satisfactory one. The seventh guitar was previously able to see with thick glasses; however, he lost them six years ago (Year 14 in the post-apocalypse), leaving him functionally blind (46). He is able to survive thanks to traveling with companions who can provide for him, although Mandel notes that several members of the Traveling Symphony are annoyed with his perceived uselessness, as he is unable to do things like hunt or cook. His role in the novel is framed almost entirely in terms of the frustration abled members of the symphony feel towards him. “He was essentially dead weight as far as the second horn was concerned,” Mandel writes, in the only passage of the book in which the character is mentioned; and one of the flutes “had a habit of sighing loudly whenever the seventh guitar had to stop rehearsal to ask for clarification on the score couldn’t see.” (10-11) Frank is given more characterization and impact on the story, but when he and Jeevan’s food dwindles and it becomes clear Jeevan will have to leave, Jeevan can only think how difficult it will be for Frank’s wheelchair to navigate the blocked, snowy streets, and it is treated as undeniable that Frank will be impossibly onerous on Jeevan should they attempt to travel together (182). In short, the world of Station Eleven is incapable of accommodating disability in any meaningful way, and disabled people are seen as burdensome to the abled protagonists. 

In Stuart Murray’s article “Disability Embodiment, Speculative Fiction, and the Testbed of Futurity,” he addresses the treatment of disability in this novel. Murray calls attention to the centrality of mobility in the novel’s vision of the apocalypse, noting that the novel takes it as a given that Frank has no place in the new world due to his lack of mobility. A central theme of the novel is the beauty present in the post-human, post-apocalyptic world. “The novel,” Murray says, “asserts that, ultimately, the new world will be a place where literature, music, and beauty are still possible, and where new forms of cooperation may lead to just societies, but not for a character such as Frank.” (Murray 6) This assertion’s presence in the novel is disappointing and unnecessary because speculative fiction, especially speculative fiction that takes a post-humanist approach to the future, can have a more nuanced and transformative view of disability. As Murray says “The most thoughtful contemporary speculative fictions of disaster and social breakdown place all bodies under pressure and…[what] might be conventionally read as disabled…becomes overturned.” (4) Speculative visions of apocalypse need not and should not exclude and minimize the disabled, not when there is the opportunity to reimagine what disability is.

Mandel’s exclusion of disability from her vision of the future is especially frustrating because since the dawn of civilization, humans have always worked to accommodate disabled members of their community. The post-apocalyptic communities in Station Eleven would certainly have the resources to support disabled community members, so why aren’t they shown to do so? There are many missed opportunities here, but I’d like to discuss Lily Patterson specifically, because her short arc, almost inconsequential to the rest of the novel, was both profoundly affecting and disappointing to me as a bipolar person on antidepressants. Lily’s suicide is portrayed as almost an inevitability; the other members of her community look for medication she can take, but once it is clear there is none, her ultimate fate is treated by the narrative as a given. She simply walks into the forest, presumably to die, and despite searching, the rest of the people at the airport terminal are unable to locate her. My question is: why? The specifics of this fictional character’s mental illness are not stated, but depressed people have existed since before pharmaceuticals, and they will exist after, should such a time come to pass in the Anthropocene age. There is hope for a depressed person besides medication; a strong support network and accommodations on low days can improve quality of life, even if these things aren’t by any means a cure. It’s disappointing that no mention is given to any efforts by the residents of Lily’s community to help and support her beyond simply looking for pills, if such efforts ever occurred before her suicide. Mandel’s treatment of her few disabled characters and lack of effort to include a more diverse (in that aspect) cast is often frustrating. 

This lack of inclusion feels odd, because it is not a reflection of reality. The WHO estimates that 16% of the world’s population “experience significant disability” (World Health Organization, “Disability”), and I would expect that disability would only become more common in the post-apocalypse, due to lack of access to medical equipment and trained doctors making even minor injuries harder to heal effectively. Are we to believe that either no members of the towns and settlements present in the novel ever experienced this, or that any who did were not supported by their communities and left to die? It’s lazy and unimaginative, and out of place in a novel about humanity’s penchant for adaptation and survival in an altered world. Disabled people can have a place in the apocalypse, and other stories have given them exactly that: for example, the film A Quiet Place centers around a family surviving in a post-apocalypse who are not at all burdened by their deaf daughter. In fact, their survival seems to in part hinge on her, as the monsters in the film track their prey based on sound, and because of their daughter, the family was already able to communicate non-verbally, giving them an advantage (Krasinski, A Quiet Place). While A Quiet Place is very different tonally from Mandel’s apocalypse, it shares similar themes of survival, beauty, and new life in a transformed world, which serves to accentuate the differences between the two texts in their treatment of the disabled. There is beauty in A Quiet Place’s apocalypse, and it is accessible to the deaf protagonist. Disabled people are worthy of life even in the post-apocalypse, and capable of existing in a capacity besides being a burden on their abled family and community members. Mandel simply fails to portray this.

Station Eleven is a good novel. It’s thematically rich and well-constructed, and I enjoyed it greatly. Unfortunately, the quality of the novel makes its failings stand out even more, and Mandel’s treatment of disability is one of the novel’s most striking failures. Mandel’s limited and limiting portrayal of disability in her world makes a troubling statement about the incompatibility of disabled existence with a post-apocalypse, a statement I find inaccurate and unimaginative. Speculative fiction and science fiction can and have approached disability in transformative, productive, and insightful ways. There is plenty of space in the post-apocalypse for disabled people and for speculation regarding disability, but not in Station Eleven. 

Works Cited

“Disability.” World Health Organization, www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health. Accessed 21 Oct. 2023.

Krasinski, John, director. A Quiet Place. Paramount Pictures, 2018.

Mandel, Emily St John. Station Eleven: A Novel. Vintage Books, 2015.

Murray, Stuart. “Disability Embodiment, Speculative Fiction, and the Testbed of Futurity.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2021, https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2021.21.