Miniature Roommate and I were deeply unhappy with the Winter Wonderland. It was at that time still two months until Christmas, and if I start feeling Winter Wonderlandy in late October, the many weeks until Christmas (I LOVE CHRISTMAS) would seem insanely long. (Lest I be misunderstood, I was not happy about the Winter Wonderland. Winter Wonderland weather is not zombie weather. But then, instead of being mildly slushy, the weather on that Saturday decided to be a Winter Wonderland(tm).
It was Halloween weekend, the weather was going to be a bit slushy (I innocently thought), and altogether it seemed like the perfect weekend for staying in and reading Colson Whitehead’s new zombie book, Zone One. I am leery of Nicole Krantz, and I am actively unfond of JFranz so decided to go with Colson Whitehead, as I know nothing to his discredit and think he has cool hair. On the weekend of Halloween, I decided to start making inroads. This formal exploration of Zone One as a zombie narrative is meant to further zombie scholarship and to frame future critical work on the novel by contextualizing it in its genre.There are certain writers in New York who seem to be everywhere but with whose work I am unfamiliar. Whitehead innovates in the genre by means of his own zombie contribution, the figure of the straggler, which facilitates more meditative thematic work than zombie narratives generally allow. Zone One's figures function similarly, as demonstrated by a formal and aesthetic analysis with specific regard to the novel's eponymous “survival space” and its constitutive barricade motif. Whereas hard breaches involve a narrative-threatening failure of diegetic barricades, the soft breach allows the zombie's destabilizing function to operate in the narrative space without posing a diegetic threat. The zombie is a deconstructive and contagious anticharacter whose destabilizing role necessitates the construction of barricades that (1) protect the characters from infection and living death, (2) delineate a narrative space in which plot and character can develop, and (3) spatialize epistemological and aesthetic modes.
Contrary to popular critical apologies, Zone One is largely a conventional zombie narrative that embraces the formal implications of the genre's tropes: notably the zombie figure itself, the barricade, and what this article calls soft and hard breaches. This article explores Colson Whitehead's Zone One and the zombie narrative genre and outlines some of the ways each illuminates structural, generic, and aesthetic qualities in the other.
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