Robert Neville is Legend
It’s hard for me to think about this book without thinking about the way Hollywood mucked up the ending to the recent film. The test audience didn’t like the real ending, so they made it much happier, and much more Hollywood. It reduced the IAL vampires to common monsters-they left in that they set complex traps and whatnot, but then made them into unnecessarily CGI’d zombie things. It sort of strips the story of all real meaning to give the humans a happily ever after in Vermont (though it’s good to know I don’t have far to travel for vampire apocalypse salvation.)
Matheson skillfully makes monotony the true villain in the piece, it’s the only side he doesn’t reason and sympathize with by the end. “…intense hope was not the answer and never had been. In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle.” (Matheson 111.) The real struggle of the book is how Neville fills his time. Watching him battle and overcome the solace of alcohol is particularly fascinating as he oscillates between abstaining and over imbibing. The way he reacts to companionship, first the dog then Ruth, with anger before anything else is interesting. The way she refers to vampire disposal as “horrible” makes Neville step back and examine his perspective: “For him the word ‘horror’ had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.” (146.) People often say one can get used to anything, and this is a prime example.
I think this book works because it’s really a character study with vampires. Neville’s inner monologs, the way he uses his time, and the kind of man he is separate this book from the rest of the pack. I wonder if Justin Cronin was shooting for this kind of a feel during the long boring parts of The Passage that felt over-burdened with character inner monolog? The stark, candid honesty of the character really makes it work for me-that Neville admits that two years earlier he would have ravaged Ruth on sight made me pause in my reading and catch my breath. Through the course of the book, Neville irons out who he is and becomes at peace with what he finds.
I will say, though, that when Will Smith's dog died I had a little cry. When the nameless book dog died I did not. I leave you with a random bit of internet humor...
Though this image illustrates that the movie did such a shitty job with the vampires that everyone thought they were zombies.
Matheson skillfully makes monotony the true villain in the piece, it’s the only side he doesn’t reason and sympathize with by the end. “…intense hope was not the answer and never had been. In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle.” (Matheson 111.) The real struggle of the book is how Neville fills his time. Watching him battle and overcome the solace of alcohol is particularly fascinating as he oscillates between abstaining and over imbibing. The way he reacts to companionship, first the dog then Ruth, with anger before anything else is interesting. The way she refers to vampire disposal as “horrible” makes Neville step back and examine his perspective: “For him the word ‘horror’ had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.” (146.) People often say one can get used to anything, and this is a prime example.
I think this book works because it’s really a character study with vampires. Neville’s inner monologs, the way he uses his time, and the kind of man he is separate this book from the rest of the pack. I wonder if Justin Cronin was shooting for this kind of a feel during the long boring parts of The Passage that felt over-burdened with character inner monolog? The stark, candid honesty of the character really makes it work for me-that Neville admits that two years earlier he would have ravaged Ruth on sight made me pause in my reading and catch my breath. Through the course of the book, Neville irons out who he is and becomes at peace with what he finds.
I will say, though, that when Will Smith's dog died I had a little cry. When the nameless book dog died I did not. I leave you with a random bit of internet humor...
Though this image illustrates that the movie did such a shitty job with the vampires that everyone thought they were zombies.