Zone One

Zone One is divided into three sections (“Friday,” “Saturday,” and “Sunday”) that relay the events of the three days leading up to the eventual fall of Fort Wonton. The events are conveyed in real time, interspersed with Mark’s flashbacks to his deep and recent past. The novel revisits his memories as far back as childhood at his Uncle Lloyd’s Manhattan apartment and as recently as his early interactions with team Omega members. These flashbacks are a result of Mark’s PASD (Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder), a condition brought on by prolonged survival on the run prior to being rescued by U.S. soldiers and brought to refuge. The narration of these events, past and present, is relayed in close third person from Mark’s perspective.

From Mark’s perspective, the reader perceives the post-apocalyptic landscape through a protagonist who considers himself “mediocre” (148) in his skills, abilities, and aspirations in life. He had always been noncommittal in his activities and relationships, taking the path of least resistance. In the post-apocalyptic world, he discovered his latent skills for survival and was no longer mediocre. Through Mark’s perspective as a once-unexceptional figure, the reader can perceive the transformation of someone average into a hardened survivalist.

At many moments, the horrific events of the novel are filtered through Mark’s sardonic humor, which others around him also participate in as a coping mechanism. To lighten up the grim nature of their duties, the sweepers invent the game, Solve the Straggler, a pastime that Mark explains “was certainly less bleak than Name That Bloodstain!” (81). His sardonic humor often adds a level of irony to post-apocalyptic circumstances. This is especially the case in Mark’s narration of witnessing his infected mother gnawing on his father’s intestines on his Last Night. What would ordinarily be an undeniably-horrific scene is humorously placed beside a parallel scene that Mark shares. He compares this horror to walking in on his mother giving his father a blow job when he was younger: “She was hunched over him, gnawing away with ecstatic fervor on a flap of his intestine, which in the crepuscular flicker of the television, adopted a phallic aspect” (87). By balancing horror with humor, Mark offsets the gravity of his traumatic memories with a desire to cope with his present. His humor ties together the everyday occurrences of his previous life with that of the new post-apocalyptic order.

The setting for the novel is Zone One, or what was formerly known as New York City’s Manhattan. As a once heavily populated city known for its diversity and immigrant population, Zone One is a symbol of modernity, and, by extension, American progress. Mark acknowledges Zone One’s symbolic significance to those around him, sharing the grim awareness of its possible demise from childhood. As a child, he imagined that “[it] was a gorgeous and intricate delusion, Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate, were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature” (6). For Mark, the destruction of New York City was already predicated in its makeup. The greatness of the city foreshadowed its demise.