World War Z Book Report

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Real Life Zombies The zombie is a cultural figure that has experienced resurgence in recent years in movies and books. In “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Karen Embry and Sarah Lauro offer a theory of why this is so. They posit that the zombie represents our unease with our own mortality, our endless consumerism, and being a “living appendage of the machine” (Embry, Lauro 93). I will show how this can be seen in World War Z by Max Brooks. At first glance World War Z appears to be just another pulp horror novel. Given a closer look one can see commentary on contemporary politics, business, and society as a whole. This aspect of the book lends itself to having the theories of Embry and Lauro applied to it. The fact that we humans have always been uneasy with our mortality is well documented in literature and scientific research. The zombie, spelled zombie, in its Haitian form is a dead body reanimated by a hungan, witch doctor, to work the fields at night (Embry, Lauro 98). The fact that in the book zombies are created by a disease (Brooks 6-8) speaks volumes of the anxiety about our own mortality and the zombie’s imperfect survival of death. The zombie remains trapped in corpse body (Embry, Lauro 97) just like…show more content…
In the book the zombie swarm that descends on Yonkers (Brooks 92-104) is like a madman’s version of rush hour. Everywhere where a zombie swarm appears in the book it is a metaphor for the modern workforce. The sole purpose of the modern capitalist worker is to do basically the same thing every day and the zombie symbolizes that drone personality (Embry, Lauro 99). Even though this novel is worldwide in scope there is a lot of scenes of zombies in the public square (i.e. malls, public schools, town squares, etc.) where the consuming and working is usually done, the perfect place to display the “inhuman, ever-consuming zombie” (Embry, Lauro
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