Having read through the latest sections of Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, it makes me wonder how groups effect people and how they act when put in a similar situation to the other characters in the world. With everything in the world which has pretty much regressed back to how life was like in the past when using horse drawn carriages was modern at the time and where groups travel together as a caravan. I believe that the groups that people associate with effect how people act in the long run
The first group that we are introduced to is the Symphony which honestly feels more like a family than a group of random strangers that were just put together as performers. You have the friendship between Kirsten and August where they work together as mentioned in the line ” …. August and Kristen even though they’d only been close friends and had in fact made a secret pact to this effect – friends forever and nothing else – ” (47). The group has its own problems but even though they’ve been through getting shot at, two of the members splitting off because of a child, fighting between the group; they always stuck together
The second group that we are introduced to in the second section of the novel is the community that is in St. Deborah. Reading through section two of the novel, St Deborah kind of remind me of the short story “The One’s Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. In a sense that instead of a child suffering it was the entire world. Whenever the prophet had something to say or something to do everyone in the group quiet. In the line “In the back row, another man whom she’d noticed earlier …. stepped forward and raised his hands over his head as he passed through the front row. Thr applause faded” (59) whenever which remind me of how the parents in Omelas. The citizens of Omelas always talked about how the child must remain in for the people of Omelas to be happy and those that represent the child in the novel are the people that in the community that survived the flu. The prophet much like the citizens of Omelas are a big influence on members of their group / community.
Being in a group their ideas tend to influence the people that are in the group so that they can remain in the group and be supported by the group members. Even in video games where you don’t actually see the person that your playing with in person, you band together to achieve a common goal in whatever you are doing. When it comes to the group in st. Deborah everyone in the group is “lead” by the prophet and anyone that didn’t go along with what the prophet said left the town. Even through personal experience I have been part of a group that was very toxic which I didn’t even notice it was effecting me until a friend of mine mentioned it. The group we were in always talked poorly on those that did what they could not whenever they failed and how they were always the group that never cheated for success while still not having succeeded once. Groups play a pretty large role when it comes to how it influences our decisions in life whether we notice it or not.
