94 pages • 3 hours read
Emily St. John MandelStation Eleven
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Chapter 7 Summary
Twenty years after “the collapse,” as they call it, a group of musicians and actors known as the Traveling Symphony walk alongside horse-drawn caravans fashioned from pickup trucks near Lake Michigan. The group formed and began traveling five years after the pandemic, when members of a military orchestra joined up with a company of actors to perform in the Great Lakes region, now dotted by small settlements. As she walks, Kirsten, now in her twenties, rehearses King Lear with her fellow actors.
The Symphony stops to rest, and Kirsten practices throwing the knives she keeps in her belt. Prompted by a recent experience with a man who powered a computer with a makeshift generator, Alexandra, the Symphony’s youngest actor, asks Kirsten about computers; to her disappointment, Kirsten cannot tell her much.
Kirsten and August, the Symphony’s second violinist, have a habit of exploring abandoned houses. August, who watched a lot of TV in his preteen years before the collapse, looks for TV Guides and poetry books. Kirsten searches for celebrity magazines for information about Arthur, whom she remembers fondly. She still has a pair of comic books he gave her.
Chapter 8 Summary
The comic books Arthur gave Kirsten belong to a series called Dr. Eleven. The first volume is called “Station Eleven,” the second “The Pursuit.” The protagonist, Dr. Eleven, is a scientist who lives on a space station designed to look like a world. No one in the Symphony has heard of the series, which appears to be part of a limited run.
Chapter 9 Summary
The Symphony arrives in St. Deborah by the Water. The last time they visited, two years earlier, Kirsten’s friend Charlie Harrison, who was pregnant, stayed behind with her husband Jeremy Leung. However, they are nowhere to be found, and the town is unusually quiet. The Symphony members prepare to perform Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Chapter 10 Summary
The chapter opens with a survey of the many minor disagreements and resentments that exist between Symphony members.
After rehearsal, Kirsten goes looking for Charlie. At the former Wendy’s restaurant where Charlie used to live, Kirsten finds two women, one of whom she recognizes as the town’s midwife. The midwife reveals that Charlie gave birth to a girl and left town over a year ago. Taking care not to be overheard, she adds that Charlie “had to leave town” because she “rejected the prophet’s advances” (51).
Walking back, Kirsten notices a girl following her. Kirsten runs into fellow Symphony member Dieter, who takes her to the town’s graveyard, where there are markers labelled for Charlie, Jeremy, and their child, although no one appears to be buried beneath them. Looking back, they ask the girl whether she knew Charlie and Jeremy. She confirms that they left the town, before fleeing from sight.
Back at the Walmart, they share their findings with other Symphony members. Another Symphony member reveals his discovery that the town underwent a “change in management” after 30 people died of fever (54), and that 20 families left the town as a result.
Chapter 11 Summary
Snippets of the Symphony’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are interspersed with historical information about Shakespeare. Kirsten plays Titania, while Sayid, her ex-boyfriend, plays King Oberon. The “plague,” “death,” and “candles” of Shakespeare’s time are also present in the Symphony’s day (57).
Chapter 12 Summary
The performance ends to great applause. The prophet, an approximately 30-year-old man who looks vaguely familiar to Kirsten, gives the Symphony a congratulatory speech, during which he asserts the divine origin of the virus that caused the pandemic, insisting that “everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason” (58). Afterwards, the Symphony’s conductor (a woman who goes only by her title) asks about Charlie and Jeremy. The prophet claims not to know anything about them before explaining that “when the fallen slink away without permission,” markers are erected to signify “the death of the soul” (62).
After refusing the prophet’s whispered request that the Symphony leave behind Alexandra as a wife for him, the conductor orders the Symphony to prepare for immediate departure. On their way out of town, they encounter a young man posted as a sentry; he asks them to take him with them, but the conductor refuses, not wanting the prophet to think they kidnapped him. After some discussion, the conductor decides to take the Symphony, now cut off from its usual territory, south towards Severn City in search of Charlie and Jeremy.
Out of habit, Kirsten looks over her few possessions, including the paperweight that Tanya gave her as well as images of Arthur clipped from tabloids.
Part 2 Analysis
Part 2 transitions from the onset of the pandemic to a point 20 years in the future, allowing readers to witness both continuities and discontinuities that exist in the world and in Kirsten’s life. She is still an actor, and she is still performing Shakespeare, but she has also developed in unexpected ways, including her talent for throwing knives. Music and drama have survived, thanks in part to the Symphony’s efforts, but they are no longer situated in a fixed location like the Elgin Theatre. Technology has reverted to more primitive standards, though relics from before the collapse are all around.
The theme of loss, memory, and nostalgia plays out in these chapters. Given the gap between the old world and the new, memory takes on extra significance in the lives of the survivors. For Kirsten, who was a child at the time of the collapse, her recollections are indistinct. Her obsession with tabloid clippings related to Arthur allows her to explore a part of the past to which she has a direct connection. As the past fades from view, Kirsten and her peers in the Symphony also forge new identities. Members of the Symphony are often referred to metonymically by the name of the instrument they play; Charlie’s husband, for instance, is often referred to as simply “the sixth guitar” (43). Likewise, most Symphony members are referred to by their position in the orchestra in the list of grievances that opens Chapter 10, and the Symphony’s conductor goes unnamed, as she is called by her title only. The implication is that membership in the Symphony becomes a primary aspect of identity in a world where most other distinctions have been lost or forgotten. Participation in the Symphony does not merely give them an individual identity; it also provides a sense of community, as evident in their collaborative performances.
These chapters also introduce readers to the prophet, his policies and philosophies, and their effects on the people under his influence. Both the boy posted as sentry and, as we later discover, the girl who follows Kirsten live in fear of the prophet and long to escape. Though the prophet speaks calmly and eloquently, he maintains control not merely through persuasion but also through force of arms. His Biblically inflected discourse asserts total authority while remaining vague enough to allow the prophet to do whatever he wishes. His authoritarian approach contrasts with the Symphony’s more democratic one; although the Symphony does have a leader, decisions are made collaboratively.
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