Revision: World War Z

One thing that's remarkable about all speculative literature, including horror, fantasy, and science fiction, is its ability to use its completely imaginary elements to help answer deeper questions about who we are as a collective human race, what it means to be human, and what value life holds. By being able to carry out problems we face past the bounds of the reality we experience, we can gain a greater understanding of them. A good example of this is the novel World War Z, written by Max Brooks. This novel has taken the rather simplistic myth of the zombie and used it to explore mankind's large-scale response to a nearly unstoppable force. Zombies were a great choice for this theme, as they present themselves as the perfectly unsympathetic enemy: they're already dead, they can't think, they have no sense of empathy, and their only motivation is to feast on the flesh (and brains) of humans. While a human in a zombie story will usually be some shade of moral gray, a zombie will always be pitch black, and thus the audience will feel no remorse when the main character smashes their face in with a shovel. This intrinsic property of the traditional zombie myth helps to foster a militant sense of moral absolutism in the characters. As the situation becomes more and more desolate, the measures taken to ensure at least some survival of the human race become more and more drastic and previously held moral values become less and less important. People in charge decided to use half the world's population as bait for the other half. Others resort to cannibalism to live. Brooks is trying to say that when our lives are on the line, a surprising amount of things we previously valued and viewed with high prestige become very trivial. While this message could also be conveyed in a regular war story, the question that a zombie story answers is slightly different. While a war story can answer the question, “How far have we gone?”, World War Z answers the question, “How far can we go?”