50 pages • 1 hour read
George R. StewartEarth Abides
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapter 5-Inter-chapterChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “World Without End”
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Driving west through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Ish meets small groups of survivors, but they cling to their familiar haunts, refusing to join Ish on his journey. As he passes over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he runs headlong into a wildfire. With no one to battle it, the unchecked fire is too intense, so he detours through a small foothill town. Eventually, he returns to his parents’ house and stocks up on food from an abandoned local supermarket.
Digression: Because those who control the water make sure it is always flowing—in spite of their impending deaths—those who survive will always have running water.
Ish fights boredom by focusing on daily tasks—cooking and cleaning, taking care of the dog, Princess. With a clinical eye, he observes the environmental changes wrought by human absence: Leaves and trash litter the streets; dogs have assumed the dominant position atop the food chain, at least in the cities. As Ish walks Princess one day, a pack of dogs follows them, and he fears he might be their next meal. He makes it back to his car safely but thereafter resolves to carry a gun at all times. The bigger problem is ants. The insects swarm through the house with little to stop them, until one day they vanish. He guesses that having reached critical population density, some pestilence kills them off.
One evening, Ish notices the lights dimming, and he fears that the electricity will go out soon. The filaments eventually burn out, leaving him in darkness.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
As the electricity dies, so too does the refrigerator, and the meat soon spoils. When the rainy season begins, drainpipes clog, flooding homes and gardens. Ish turns to the Bible for comfort, finding its “man-versus-nature” themes appropriate. He imagines himself and the world as two halves of a great algebraic equation always striving for balance. The next morning, he sees smoke rising in the distance and believes it to be the sign of another human being. He considers investigating but is wary of “human entanglements.” Later that night, however, he sees a light and drives toward it, locating the house and approaching it. A woman opens the door. They share a meal, and Ish recounts all his exploits since the snake bite. He feels a connection—personal and, he hopes, sexual—but as a loner, the art of seduction does not come easily. The desire, however, is mutual, and eventually, he and the woman make love.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
The next morning, she—Emma—moves into Ish’s house. She doesn’t talk about her past, but through casual asides, he learns she was married with two children. Over time, she becomes a calming voice of reason for him. When the car battery dies, they find a warehouse full of them.
Digression: Cars, once the symbol of human innovation, are now subject to the forces of nature. Batteries corrode, tires go flat, and even these tightly engineered machines cannot survive the passage of time.
Emma suggests that she and Ish have children, but Ish is hesitant because there are no doctors. However, eventually he agrees. One day, they notice swarms of rats in the neighborhood. Ish estimates that, with an unlimited supply of food and few predators, there may be as many as one billion rats occupying the city. Now, he fears an outbreak of bubonic plague (although starvation seems a more likely scenario to decrease the population). Indeed, as the food supply dwindles, the rats begin to prey on each other until the few remaining take refuge below ground.
Emma announces that she is pregnant. She and Ish feel some initial trepidation because Emma is Black and Ish is white (interracial relationships are not well tolerated in this era), but their anxiety makes little sense given their situation. In the end, their love is all that matters.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
Ish visits the university library and is awed by the vast collection of knowledge. He feels the responsibility to preserve that knowledge for future generations. He also decides to start keeping track of time because “time was history, and history was tradition, and tradition was civilization” (121). He begins charting the angle of the sunset, and they decide to start the new year (“Year One”) on the winter solstice. He looks forward to meeting new people and rebuilding civilization.
Inter-chapter Summary: “Quick Years”
One year later, Ish and Emma commemorate the passing of Year One. They have one child, John, and another on the way. Ish’s garden is ravaged by wildlife and yields only scant produce. Their second child, Mary, is born, and a wanderer, Ezra, lives with them briefly. Year Two (the “Year of Ezra”) gives way to the “Year of the Fires” (129), in which wildfires ravage the neighboring hills. In Year Four—“the Year of the Coming” (130)—Ezra returns with his two wives and two children. Later, Ish and Ezra bring back George and Maurine—an older couple—and Emma has a second son, Roger. They form a small community, “the Tribe.”
The years pass, more children are born, and the earth adapts, sometimes in harsh ways (starving cattle, a plague of grasshoppers). By October, however, the rains bring new growth, and the Tribe is hopeful. Year Seven brings mountain lions down from the hills in search of food (most of the cattle have died off). Ish is mauled by one and walks with a limp afterward. The Tribe members try holding religious services, but lack of unity ends the practice.
A passing visitor infects the Tribe with a cold, and they are reminded of their general good health. With so few humans left, the chain of infection has been broken. Later that year, however, three of the children die from an unknown cause. In successive years, more children are born, and by Year 16, the two eldest children marry (love is forsaken for necessity). In Year 21, an earthquake destroys many of the weaker houses in the neighborhood, but the Tribe now stands at 36, including seven grandchildren.
Part 1, Chapter 5-Inter-chapter Analysis
In Chapter 6, an electric bulb burns out, and Ish feels himself reduced to a child lost in the dark. The symbolism here illustrates the theme of Civilization Versus Atavism: As the “light” of technological modernity disappears, a new “dark age” is arriving, one in which humanity will once again become immature, or childlike. This outcome is what Ish believes he must fight against in his struggle to preserve civilization.
Ish, for so long a solitary figure focused only on survival, meets Emma (and others), and the narrative transitions into a saga of civilization building or preservation. Ish discovers that there is strength in numbers, and soon, the small colony of survivors grows. Repopulation becomes the top priority, and empathy falls by the wayside. More than once, Ish avoids “all those who had suffered too much from the shock, whose minds or bodies were not what one wanted to build up the new society” (124). For Ish, social Darwinism seems necessary in extreme circumstances, and he feels the humanitarian impulse recede as the group grows closer to brute existence in what could be called the natural state, again reflecting the theme of Civilization Versus Atavism.
In Ish’s program for rebuilding the race, the strong should be welcomed into the community, and the weak should be left to perish. (Theme: The Ambivalence of Power/Mastery.) There is also a eugenicist element in Ish’s contempt for Evie, a young girl whom he considers “half-witted.” He suggests that she should be forbidden from having children, presumably for fear of “corrupting” the gene pool. In this regard, Ish’s concept of civilization is based on biological imperative rather than empathy or respect; survivalism dictates the Tribe’s values.
The need for continuing the species is clear, a standard trope in post-apocalyptic fiction. All species reproduce—it’s one of the definitions of life—and human beings are no different. Once the Tribe members gather and establish themselves as a community, they start having babies. When the babies are old enough, they marry and have babies of their own. Emotional considerations like love are frivolities at this point. Ish and Emma’s daughter, Mary, may or may not love Ralph, but that’s beside the point. She is old enough to bear children, and that is the final determinant. Likewise, when the community embraces Ezra’s bigamy, it’s not because they are openminded about what love can look like but because they believe two child-bearers are better than one. It seems that “romantic love had merely been another necessary casualty of the Great Disaster” (141).
The narrative also serves as a lesson in how ecosystems change when their natural balance is upset. Ish carefully notes how the decline in predators affects the growth of other species. When the roaming dogs kill most of the cats, the rat population swells until it reaches critical mass and then dies off from lack of food. The death of cattle brings mountain lions out of the neighboring hills and into the suburbs. The eradication of the human population, however, has the greatest effect. Those carefully constructed components of civilization—running water, electricity, infrastructure—collapse, leaving the survivors with few options other than eating and procreation, just like every other species on the planet. After two decades, they manage to build a fledgling social group three generations strong.
Humans differ from other species in one important way, however: their need for norms, rituals, traditions, and culture—all of which constitute the theme of The Role of Culture in a Cohesive Social Order. After losing track of the days, Ish and the others decide that marking time is essential for any return to civilization. They mark the passing years by carving them into a rock face, even naming each year according to significant events. They also try to establish traditions of education and religion, although with less success. These traditions, Stewart suggests, are what differentiate humans from other species and may be the one thing that insures its survival. It’s only a matter of time, after all, before the houses collapse, the guns run out of ammunition, and the food supply dwindles. The first generation of survivors must pass on knowledge of the “Old Times” to the next generation if they are to flourish. Even the vast libraries are useless if the children can’t read. Earth Abides foresees not only the death of human civilization but the necessity of those rituals and customs if that civilization is to reemerge intact.
