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, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “World Without End”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
In the 1940s United States, a radio broadcast announces that the federal government has been “suspended,” and all military forces are under the authority of state governments. Further, all hospitalizations in the Bay Area have been consigned to a single facility in Berkeley.
Isherwood Williams (“Ish”), a graduate student working on his geography thesis in the Sierra Nevada mountains, is bitten by a rattlesnake while rock climbing. Sucking the venom from the wound, he crafts a makeshift tourniquet and walks back to his cabin. With no means of communication, he is completely isolated. He decides to wait until the swelling subsides and then seek help. He sleeps, and when he awakens, two men are standing in his cabin. When he tells them he is sick, they flee, panic-stricken. Shortly thereafter, his condition worsens, and he fears he will die. He passes the night wracked with chills and fever.
The narrative digresses to a brief discourse on species fluctuation, describing how populations rise and fall but rarely remain steady. Humanity is no different, and, after millennia of population growth, it is due for a “reflux.”
The next morning, Ish feels better. He drives to the nearby general store but finds it empty. He continues driving but is disconcerted by the lack of people—no drivers, no fishermen during fishing season. Ten miles down the road, he comes to the town of Hutsonville.
Digression: A rat species living in the South Pacific thrives on a bountiful food supply and has few predators, but when a plague hits the population, the rats die off despite plenty of food and “a very rapid breeding rate” (10).
As Ish nears Hutsonville, he sees a corpse by the side of the road. The town itself is deserted except for a few dogs and chickens. He sees a newspaper headline: “CRISIS ACUTE.” The article reports that an unknown disease has decimated 25-35% of the US population. The disease is likely airborne and spreading rapidly. The popular theory is that it’s a form of biological warfare originating in a lab. Civilization, the paper reports, still functions—water and power are on, doctors are reporting to work, and average citizens volunteer to help. Driving through the town, Ish finds not a single body, dead or alive. He breaks into a house and turns on the radio but finds only static. He lies on the couch and falls asleep.
When he wakes, he wonders if the snake venom in his system has rendered him immune to the plague. He eats and heads for his parents’ house. Along the way, he drives past the cemetery and notices rows of fresh graves, and he sees other eerie signs: a coyote strolling down the middle of the freeway, a man crushed beneath an abandoned car. Arriving home, he finds the house deserted but decides to wait in case his parents return. He watches the lights spread across the East Bay and ponders the future of humankind.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Ish makes a few phone calls, but no one answers. He turns out all the lights, feeling less “conspicuous” in the darkness. The next morning, he searches for fellow survivors by driving through the city and honking his horn. After a few random encounters—a dying person and a couple Ish deems too dangerous to befriend—he meets an older man, but he is incoherent with shock and survivor’s guilt. Ish considers crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco but despairs of finding anyone alive, so he circles back.
Digression: The narrator imagines a world without humans, a world in which animals roam freely through a deserted civilization.
Back home, Ish considers the “[s]econdary” deaths from accident, suicide, illness, etc. and wonders if humanity can survive. He compiles lists of reasons to continue living and assets that he could offer to a rebuilding world. He considers his secularism to be one such asset—looking for divine purpose in the devastation could jeopardize his mental health, he thinks. That night, he resolves to search the country for survivors.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Ish’s car is too old for a cross-country expedition, so he takes a newer one from a neighboring garage, remembering to bring the hammer he has been carrying with him. Along the way, he stocks up on supplies—food, camping gear, guns—and he adopts a stray dog, whom he names Princess. He drives south through the San Joaquin Valley, but the roads and towns are empty. Turning east, he faces 200 miles of desert, so he stops in a small town and collects extra water and a motorcycle that he lashes to the back of the car. He spends the night in a motel and then decides to cross the desert after sunset to avoid the heat. Facing death in the desert, he suddenly feels liberated from his fear, accepting whatever fate may lie ahead. He leaves the motorcycle behind, and he spends the night sleeping on the ground.
Digression: The desert is formidable and unchanging, despite the traces of human civilization left upon it. A thousand years from now, the desert will remain much as it always has. The desert animals will find appropriate grazing, settle into their old, wild behaviors, and outlast humans.
Ish passes into Arizona. Storm runoff partially blocks the road, and he wonders how long before nature overruns the infrastructure. After spending the night in Kingman, he drives across open rangeland. He estimates that, without human regulation, the entire landscape will change within 25-50 years. He crosses the Continental Divide and enters Albuquerque, New Mexico. Thus far, he has not seen another living human. He continues toward Chicago, but a fallen tree forces him to take a detour. In Arkansas, he encounters a group of Black farmers and buys eggs from them. The farmers seem deferential toward him, and Ish—who is white—speculates that if he were to stay with them, he could establish a position of power and dominate the area. However, the thought passes, and he goes on his way. He eventually stops outside of Memphis for the night. Walking through town, he spots a cow and her calf. He shoots and butchers them for the meat. He continues east, foraging and hunting. He meets occasional survivors but moves on (he has not found anyone willing to travel with him) until he enters New Jersey.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
He crosses into Manhattan, “the center of the world” (66). He enters a chapel, but so far, he has found no survivors. He heads south, exploring the city until he reaches Battery Park, “the end of the road” (71). He turns around and heads north again when a man, Milt, calls out to him. Milt takes him to the apartment he shares with his friend, Ann, and they have dinner together. Milt and Ann are pleasant enough, but even amid the disastrous aftermath of a pandemic, they seem content to drink martinis and play card games. Ish feels their lives are aimless, so he soon decides to head west again.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Stewart employs third-person omniscient narration in the novel; however, the focus of the narration is narrow, so the reader encounters the world in real time along with the protagonist. In this way, the reader processes this grim new reality simultaneously with Ish. They experience his curiosity, his fear, and finally, his grief when he returns to his parents’ empty house.
At the same time, Stewart’s post-apocalyptic tale takes a quieter approach than much of the fiction of this genre, particularly of the post-war era. With the world mired in a Cold War, much of the fiction reflected scenarios of nuclear Armageddon, but Earth Abides is largely free from spectacle and deals with a subtler foe: a global pandemic.
Stewart begins to elaborate some of the themes he aims to tackle, such as Civilization Versus Atavism, The Ambivalence of Power/Mastery, and The Role of Culture in a Cohesive Social Order. In Chapter 1, Ish finds himself obeying traffic laws when there’s no traffic and resisting breaking into a store even though the owner is dead. These are the norms of a world that no longer exists, something that Ish feels acutely. Stewart also suggests that, even in times of social breakdown, humans have an innate need to cling to rituals of social order. Indeed, when Ish meets Milt and Ann living in a spacious apartment in Manhattan, they drink martinis and play cards as if it’s an ordinary Saturday night. Their adherence to routine is so complete that they don’t even talk about the plague or what they might do in its aftermath.
Chapter 1 introduces the symbol of the hammer. The quintessential tool, it represents the technological civilization that is ending; the transformation of its significance as the novel progresses is one of the key indexes to the theme of Civilization Versus Atavism. Atavism describes the return or recurrence of ancestral features, as these were understood by anthropology in the era in which the book was published.
The novel’s era is also evident in the protagonist’s racist impulses. When Ish encounters the Black farmers, he imagines that he could easily stay and dominate them as a petty tyrant, evidencing the theme of The Ambivalence of Power/Mastery. The idea recurs in his slaughter of the cow and her calf: The animals are far more meat than he needs, and the killing is really an assertion of Ish’s dominance—his attempt to regain control of a chaotic situation. Stewart implies that, in the wake of such a global disaster, humans will try to reassert their dominance. Ish feels “unsatisfied” until he kills the calf and eats its liver, as if he can find consolation only in reestablishing his place at the top of the food chain. Indeed, he kills several more animals along the way in an equally capriciousness manner.
The narrative is intermittently punctuated by digressive asides that read like a historical account of the plague as told from the future. The asides detail biological fluctuations in species populations, from wildflowers to insects to domesticated animals. On the surface, these digressions create a narrative distance from Ish’s storyline, adding a clinical perspective to the emotional devastation he experiences. They also, however, provide necessary perspective, situating humanity squarely in the middle of every other species on Earth—no better, no worse. While humans have dominated the food chain for millennia, the plague is the great equalizer, and humans fall victim to nature just as easily as the calf falls to Ish’s rifle.
