I Am Legend

With a better understanding of vampiris, Neville tries to debunk the Undead’s seemingly vampire nature, such as their weakness to garlic. He creates a two-column list comparing Undead traits as explained by science or legend. His inability to make a connection between the two columns throws him into a fury, unleashing “repressed craving for violence” (81). Neville begins drinking heavily and attacks the microscope, damaging it. He spends two days drunk and incapable of studying or taking care of himself. On the third morning, he goes outside and sees a dog on his lawn. The dog limps, as one of his front paws is wounded.

Surprised, Neville chases the dog, but his enthusiasm frightens the latter into hiding. Afterward, he “dredged up again the endless enigma of why he went on” (85) and considers why he hasn’t died by suicide when he will have to spend the rest of his life alone and in hiding; ultimately, he believes himself “too dumb” to see to his own death. Neville prays for the dog’s safety despite his lack of faith. He sets out a hamburger and a bowl of milk on the porch to entice the dog to return.

The next morning, Neville finds that the dog ate his food. He begins leaving out food twice a day, standing nearby while the dog eats so the latter becomes accustomed to him. Neville reasons that if the dog survived this long, there might be other humans who managed to do the same. As several days pass, the dog becomes more comfortable with Neville, until he stops coming for three days. When he returns, he is noticeably sick and weak, having been infected with vampiris.

Neville becomes distraught. He resolves to cure the dog and manages to capture it. The dog hides under Neville’s bed. Neville puts a blanket on the floor, and the terrified dog burrows into it. He manages to hold the dog and calmly pet it, but the latter is too sick to be cured. The dog dies within a week.

After the dog dies, Neville finds that he does not resort to destructive drinking as he expected. Rather, he is at such a low point that “the only way he could go was up” (100). Neville accepts the “dungeon” he is in, gives up hope, and returns to studying.

Neville remembers the period after Virginia died, but when there were still humans living in the city. He had been aimlessly wandering the streets when he got caught up in a crowd walking toward a tent to hear a religious sermon against the Undead. The speaker claimed that they needed to pray for salvation from the Undead’s sinfulness.

This memory prompts Neville to study psychology texts, as he draws a connection between people’s reaction to the initial spread of the contagion and the sensationalist journalism of newspapers covering the outbreak. He reasons that when people became infected, and later became Undead by vampiris, they were so shocked that they began appropriating vampire legend as personal truth. His discovery reinterprets the Undead as infected people so convinced that they are vampires, that they mimic them.