The story of Station 11 by Emily st. John Mandel in part two gets really interesting. We are set in the future twenty years later after the epidemic of the Georgia Flu. From the way how the part 2 describes it, the population has decrease drastically from the flu. We soon learn the Kirsten has manage to live up to this point. She starts travelling with The Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians. The life she had before the flu changes a lot and now she is living a new life.
Kirsten travels with her group by performing plays. Since the flu broke out, many of the people living in the present created settlements and try to rebuild their lives as much as they can. It is understandable that many of the people are depress for living in a world that has become a place where it has most certain turned against. The Traveling Symphony has been performing for a long time, “The Traveling Symphony moved between the settlements of the changed world and had been doing so since five years after the collapse,”(37). This shows that they have been doing this for fifteenth years. They do this in order to make people happy during these difficult times of living.
Living in this apocalypse has not been difficult for Kirsten. She has lost her family members due to the flu but she keeps on finding reasons to live for. She is like a scavenger, she often looks for items in abandon houses to find anything useful or something fun to interact with (39). If someone is able to enjoy to look around abandon house must be trying to enjoy living this life style. This might even be an adventure for her. She also has these old comic books of “Station Eleven” and “Dr.Eleven” that were given by Arthur (42). She loves these comics so much that she rereads them many times. These comics are important to her and to the rest of the novel as it create future connections. These comics were not mass produced and to be able to find them is really rare (42).
There is no place to return to. The Traveling Symphony mostly travel to different settlements to perform. Everything is gone and nothing is left, however “What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty” (55). Even though many of normal everyday life they once knew doesn’t mean you should be sad. There is still many reasons to live for. Where there is destruction their will always be creation. In others words there will still be happiness. As soon the group starts travelling again, All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, “THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient” (56). In the writing of the caravan, it means surviving is not the same as living. You have to find a purpose to keep on living. This group keeps on living to perform to many people in order to bring happiness, this is their purpose to survive.
This is what is like to live twenty years in the future. This is what their purpose is.
