The Zombie Apocalypse as Deconstructive Literature

The English word apocalypse comes, via Latin, French, and then Middle English, from a Greek word apokálypsis, meaning "uncovering" or "lifting of the veil." Thanks mostly to the context of its appearance in the Book of Revelation, modern connotative usage typically associates apocalypse with the end of the world; actually, the apocalypse itself was not that event, but its revelation to John.

The best zombie apocalypse stories are inherently revelatory. As author Robert Kirkman writes in the introduction to The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye:

"Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society... and our society's station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too... but there's always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness."

The literature of disaster in general relies on the breakdown of infrastructure as a significant element. These major changes in environment and social structure provide a good vehicle for exploring how people interact and how society functions in the absence of established order. The stress of crisis is revelatory on an individual and a societal level; a familiar adage claims that crisis brings out the best and the worst in people, but what crisis actually does is reveal their real nature.

Stripping away the superficial layers of a culture can reveal things about that social structure through the act of deconstructing it. The result is a literature of deconstructive discourse like that in the latter chapters of the 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars, which author Max Brooks uses to explore how modern Americans respond to the loss of the highly technical, sedentary, comfortable culture most took for granted until the dead began to walk and the pandemic stressed the world's infrastructure past functioning. In examining the loss of the infrastructure, superficial culture, and social order most people take for granted, zombies and other disasters reveal how much of that superficial culture is artificial and not necessarily in humanity's best interest.

Much of zombie film and literature is explicitly focused on the revelation of a deliberately concealed truth. In Mira Grant's novelFEED, the characters themselves are journalists actively engaged in the pursuit of facts and the process of deconstruction, discourse, and critique. The Resident Evil video games and movies are centered on the characters' process of learning the truth about the outbreak and their role in it. This tendency reveals something interesting about the mindset underlying modern culture, since this zombe literature historically seems to tap into underlying cultural anxieties; pandemic disease is an obvious source, along with hubris and misuse of science and technology, but this focus on secrecy and conspiracy is interesting and rather telling.

In a genre very concerned with truth and its concealment and revelation, the most important revelation of all is that the veil existed to be lifted.