I am Legend my version

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could make it back. That is why he chose to stay near the house  on those days, besides there was always something to do around the house. The vampires constantly made a mess of things. They tore at the walls, shattered the mirrors that he hung up, and there was always a corpse or two to clean up. Once they got hungry enough and tired of waiting for him to come out they would inevitably feed on each other leaving him to clean up the pieces in the morning.

He always took the bodies to the burning hole even though he knew they would not come back to life come night fall. It was just a habit from back when he did not understand and when there were people to enforce the rules. As far as he knew he was the only one left in the city maybe even the world but he still held out with his irrational hope that someone would come save him.  That a tank would come rolling down his street and an army man would knock on his door and say “Mr. Neville, it is over now we have come to take you to a safe place free of infection.”

Whenever he envisioned the end of this pandemic he could not help but remember the beginning. Kathy and Virginia sitting down at the table while he pled heaping spoonful’s of mashed potatoes to their plates. God, what he wouldn’t give to see them again. They had been laughing about something Kathy had said and they could hear the phone ringing in the other room but no one had been eager to answer it. That should have been a sign. He had excused himself from the table noticing the disapproving stares from Virginia but it could be work calling. He had to answer it.

It wasn’t work, it was his father and he was ecstatic, after years and years of failures he had finally created bacteria that would regrow flesh over large wounds. It was going to save burn victims from so much pain and lengthy recoveries. It only took one night to regenerate the flesh! His father’s biggest and greatest achievement was what doomed the human race, and it had been created to help.

What if he could find something to irradiate the bacteria? Would he be able to cure the vampirism that had taken hold of the world? He had his father’s notes. His mother had given them to him after his father had succumbed to the sickness, before anyone knew where it came from or what it was. He owed humanity, he had to make up for the sins of his father. But it would never work. He was not a scientist and besides they all failed, what could he do that they couldn’t? He will just wait for the military to come save him. He still had plenty left to do to the house to make it safer for him at night. He would just wait.

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The first sign of life in so long! So long in fact he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a creature that was not a vampire. A timid little dog was sitting across the street pawing at the dirt looking for food. He was worried about it he could see the sun setting but if the dog had managed to last this long it must know when it is safe to be outside. He looked away for a moment when he heard the masses of vampires and when he looked back the dog was gone.  Hopefully he was safe. He did not want to give up on this new life he had found. It would be so nice to talk to something again. It had been so long.

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                He had been giving the dog food for a few days and finally it was starting to trust him. He was even able to pet it briefly while he gave it some food but it never came in the house. He would have to find a way to get it inside. That would be the safest place for it.

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He was glad he looked out the window when he did. The dog was injured; how did he not notice it when he fed it that morning?  The vampires were literally crawling out of the woodwork of the houses in the neighborhood and the dog was not able to get away. He didn’t even hesitate, he ran outside and fought off the vampires trying to get to the dog.  He got the dog in the house but he could not be sure it wasn’t infected. He would just have to watch it closely for the next day or so. It was not like he had to fear infection for himself.

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The dog was infected. He should have gotten him inside sooner.  He was going to try to do everything he could to cure that dog. He needed a companion. He was getting so lonely. He began pulling vampires off the street, he had gotten quite good at setting up traps for them with him as the bate. Everything he tried though just killed the vampire. He read through his father’s notes. He spent all the daylight hours he could at the library researching everything he could on bacteria. He even looked into vampire books like Dracula  and folk lore on that subject. The  only thing he could determine was that what he was doing was not working. He stole microscopes from abandoned high schools and soon his house was looking more like a chemistry lab than a house but still no cure. He was now going through four or five vampires a week. And disappointed, he would bring their bodies to the ever smoldering burning pit. The poor dog locked up starving for blood.

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He had a breakthrough. He killed the bacteria and mixed it with the chemical compounds of garlic and injected the vampires with it like a vaccine. It worked for a few days. They started looking human again but before the week was through their bodies rejected the cure and they turned to puddles of coagulated blood on his experimentation tables.

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More signs of life today, unless his mind was playing tricks on him. He saw a woman. A tan woman walking through the fields by the burning pit but before he could reach her she was gone.

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He saw her again today, this time he tried coaxing her to him like he did the dog. It was working but dusk was falling and he had to go back home where it was safe.

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She showed up at his house. She had followed him home. He did not know what to do when he saw her standing on his step just before the vampires got to the house. He had to let her. She told him that she had survived with her husband but he was dead now and she was totally alone. She wanted to know everything he knew about the vampires so he told her what he had found out. He was proud of his achievements and it was nice to have someone to talk to. They had been living together for weeks and he was becoming more and more hopeful that there were more people out there if they both could survive. But one morning he woke up and she was gone and in her place on their bed was a letter

Robert,

Now you know. Know that I was spying on you, know that almost everything that I have told you was a lie.

I’m writing this note though, because I want to save you if I can.

When I was first given the job of spying on you, I had no feeling s about your life, because I did have a husband, Robert. You killed him. But I now know that you were forced into your situation as much as we were into ours. That is why I am warning you to leave. We are coming after you. We have created a society. We have developed a pill that will feed the bacteria but also keep it from spreading. I left you one because I knew you wouldn’t believe it was true , but it is!

You are a danger to this new society we have created. Please leave and maybe they won’t come after you.

Please forgive me for everything. It nearly killed me to leave but I had to. Please believe this: When we were together in the darkness close to each other, I was not spying on you. I loved you.

Ruth

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He watched them come destroy the “dead” vampires. He let them take him. They injected him with something and he passed out. When he woke, he saw Ruth staining over him.

“Why didn’t you run?”

“There was nothing left for me, I thought about it but there was nothing to run towards”

“Take these then” she said as she handed him some small white pills “they will make your death less painful”

She kissed him and left him. He swallowed the pills and laughed to himself. Full circle he thought. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am Legend.

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He opened his eyes. What was this? Where was he?

“Welcome to the new society Robert” Ruth said

Robert Neville as a classical hero: Final Project analysis

Robert Neville as a classical hero

Alix Wright

Final project analysis

A hero, according to classical mythology, is a man of “royal birth or even, like the Titan Prometheus, half mortal, half god.  He must perform extraordinary feats. His is a noble character which is close to perfectly ideal but for a fatal flaw. The suffering of the character is physical. Death must occur in an unusual way. The hero fights for his own honor; his deeds belong to the community only after his death.” (Vera Norman from: Four Conceptions of the Heroic http://www.fellowshipofreason.com/archives/4heroes.htm) Robert Neville is actually an antihero. An antihero is a character who “lacks the attributes that make a heroic figure, as nobility of mind and spirit, a life or attitude marked by action or purpose.” (www.dictionary.com) His purpose may be to survive but he is not doing anything for the greater good.

For my final project I wrote a short story modeling Neville after the classical hero. I made him the son of a scientist who first discovered the vampire virus because there would be no gods in modern western society. I did this because the person who discovered or created the bacteria created the fate of the humans much like a god would. His extraordinary feats were attempting to save the dog and the child that he thought was not infected. His fatal flaw is science. In looking for a cure or a cause for the bacteria he brought about his death when he attracted the attention of the conscious vampires (versus the dead ones who were only reanimated flesh.) In keeping true to the original story I kept his death the same the fact that he is the anomaly and the thing to be feared is enough of an unusual death. In my story he is fighting for his honor and not just for survival because he wants to make up for the pandemic his father unleashed onto the world.

My purpose in writing this short story was to play around with the idea of the hero and to see how the profoundness of realizing that you are the “other” would play out if you were a person who believed you were fighting for the good of all. The form of my story is after the hero’s journey by Joseph Campbell. Who argued along with Jung that the hero is always the same. In every culture the hero’s story follows the same pattern as shown here from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.

 

The outline of the journey is as follows:

I.                  Departure
- The Call to Adventure
- Refusal of the Call
- Supernatural Aid
- The Crossing of the First Threshold
- The Belly of the Whale

II. Initiation
- The Road of Trials
- The Meeting with the Goddess
- Woman as the Temptress
- Atonement with the Father
- Apotheosis
- The Ultimate Boon

III. Return
- Refusal of the Return
- The Magic Flight
- Rescue from Without
- The Crossing of the Return Threshold
- Master of the Two Worlds
- Freedom to Live

The departure is the beginning of the hero’s journey. It starts out with a call to adventure. For Neville the call to adventure came previous to my story when the pandemic started. Campbell calls it “the awakening of the self” (p.51 The Hero with a Thousand faces from now on will be referred to as HWTF.) For my Neville this awakening was the realization that his father was the cause of the pandemic and his decision to make it right again by finding the cure. My story starts with the refusal of the call where Neville just wants to survive. He goes about his business vampire proofing the house and collecting supplies to last him through until someone else comes to rescue him.

Supernatural aid, according to Joseph Campbell is when a “protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass”(HWTFp.69). The dragon forces are the struggles. Since Neville is the only human left the supernatural aid comes in the form of his conscience and his memories of what his father was trying to accomplish.

Crossing the first threshold is when the hero moves from the known to the unknown. For my Neville this comes about when he starts researching the disease and when he starts experimenting with his cures on the vampires.

In part II of the hero’s journey the hero is coming closer to his goal. For Neville that comes about with the cure that works for a little while but  it also sowed the seeds for his destruction because he was taking so many vampires off the street he became noticed. Ruth was sent (woman as the temptress) to learn about his doings and he was judged to be a danger to her new society.

In the end Neville is killed because he is a danger and an “other”  which fulfills the criteria for an unusual death. At the end of my story as compared to the novel, Neville is reborn as a vampire to keep with the archetypal hero’s journey and also with classical mythology. Heroes are rewarded for their deeds by the gods getting sent to the Elysian Fields (nirvana, heaven…) so his rebirth as a vampire is allowing him to be a part of this new society.

I think I captured Neville’s voice well but I had to change it slightly because I could not have my classical hero being so pessimistic. It was interesting trying to change some aspects of his character with out completely changing him so that he would be unrecognizable. The only aspect that I am not fond of with my short story is the fact that my Neville closely resembles the Neville from the movie starring Will Smith. It was hard to move away from that version of Neville because in the movie he is more heroic than in the novel. He does not have such dark moods and he is trying to turn the vampires he catches human again instead of just killing them.

When I was writing this story I did a lot of research first. I reread the novel and then I looked into the classical hero and the hero’s journey but once I write it I don’t revise that much. I really only check for grammar and spelling because I find that if I revise I lose the voice of the piece and it no longer flows or sounds authentic.

What I liked most about my story was my character Neville. I really did not like Neville from the novel. I thought he was vile and boring so I got rid of the characteristics that I did not like (lucky for me the characteristics I did not like made him an antihero.) So I am particularly proud of him as a character.

Let the Right One in

According to Freud the uncanny is something that evokes a sense of horror and dread because it is something that is opposite of what is common or known. He argues that it is scary because it is unknown. He goes on to say that what is unknown is not always scary but what is known is never scary. He gives us this example of the idea of the Sand Man which was very frightening for children at the time he was writing. He gave an example of a child who saw his father die and became obsessed with the idea of the sand man to the point that he was deemed a mad man. He explains this uncanny fear

"We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration — the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis. We may try on rationalistic grounds to deny that fears about the eye are derived from the fear of castration, and may argue that it is very natural that so precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a proportionate dread. Indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper secret than a justifiable dread of this rational kind."

This idea of the uncanny relates to this novel because the uncanny element in this story is the fact that a child which people think of as innocent is actually a killer. That is totally an unknown quality. The fact that a child is never suspected of committing murder which is what people thought was happening. Parents had no way of even protecting their children from this threat because they were never even thinking of Eli as a threat. This would most definitely lead to the felling of inadequacy as a parent because protecting their children is seen as a parental duty.