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.
Themes
Civilization Versus Atavism
In Part 2, Chapter 1, Ish reflects on how civilization was “built up” by planning, striving, exploration, and acquiring mastery (160). Ish is aware that these values created and sustained modern technological society. At play here is the trope of history as civilization’s progress, growing slowly out of “primitive” social organization, religion, culture, technology, and values. The return of ancestral traits—as midcentury America conceived of it—is called atavism, and it is atavism that Ish fears but ultimately learns to accept.
In Part 1, Chapter 5, Ish sees a light bulb’s filament burn out: “‘The lights are going out. The lights of the world!’ he thought and he felt like a child going alone into the dark” (89). The symbolism is evident: The electric light of technology and enlightenment is disappearing, leaving humankind in the darkness, reduced again to a state of immaturity and fear: new dark ages. This is Ish’s worry and the fate he struggles against. However, there are signs from the beginning that the regression is inevitable if not salutary: Even calling the group the “Tribe” refers obviously to pre-modern societies. This particular connotation in the word is also apt in drawing from the many years in which anthropologists exalted Western cultures above all other ways of life. To the average midcentury American scientist—such as Ish—many non-Western peoples were seen as “primitive” and even “childlike.” Yet the narrative also employs the word “tribe” for one of its more neutral senses, denoting a human community that has formed beyond ties of kinship. Such a community is the beginning of what Ish sees as a lofty project: society. Ish’s project, however, is partly a pretext for preserving the ironically named “Old Times.”
Emma—and later, others—represent an antithesis to Ish’s worldview. They settle into the new way of life when Ish refuses to do the same, and this makes them seem apathetic to Ish. He insists on giving the children an education—a modern education—but for the children, what Ish teaches about the lost world is so remote from their lives that it operates only on the level of myth. They believe, for example, that a lost race of people called Americans created the world.
At various points, Ish notes the rise of superstitions among his Tribe. This troubles him at first, but as the narrative progresses, he learns to accept it. By the end of the novel, Ish is the only remaining survivor of the pandemic catastrophe—everyone else has only ever known the world after the event. Ish slowly realizes that their world is not his, and it never will be. In Part 2, Chapter 10, he decides to stop trying to educate the young ones and allow them to create their own knowledge relevant to their world, even if Ish realizes that it may consist of superstition: Such myths are meaningful to them. As he says elsewhere, “Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization” (276).
The best symbol of this philosophical transformation and Ish’s acceptance of it is the hammer, which appears at the very beginning as a useful tool when Ish finds himself alone and struggling to survive in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. As the novel progresses, the hammer takes on other symbolic values—in particular, it begins to function as a totem of power and leadership. When Ish dies at the novel’s end and he is asked to hand on the hammer to someone else, he gives it to his great-grandson, Jack—even though Ish realizes that Jack is awash in superstition. Jack had previously irritated Ish when he formed an irrational idea that copper was better than silver for killing certain animals, and when he described the new society’s belief in people called the “Old Ones” who made the Golden Gate Bridge and other structures. Ish realizes that the new society needs leaders like Jack, who are comfortable with mythic narratives in which the cosmos is more poetic than scientific.
The Ambivalence of Power/Mastery
The pursuit of mastery was key to the success of the civilization that has passed, something that Ish reflects upon at several points in the novel. However, the society that is growing with each successive generation as Ish ages appears—to Ish’s eyes—to be passive and complacent, uninterested in struggle, exploration, or acquiring power over nature. In short, the cultural values that created “civilization,” or at least, the technological civilization of Western modernity that Ish wants to preserve and rebuild, are disappearing. By the end of the novel, however, Ish has come to accept the new mindset in a way that parallels his acceptance of atavism, described in the theme called Civilization Versus Atavism. In the process, he comes to wonder if Western civilization was not so great after all: “He suddenly thought of all that had gone to build civilization—of slavery and conquest and war and oppression” (336).
The novel explores the ambivalence of power/mastery in three related areas: civilization and mastery, interpersonal power, and power over nature. The theme of civilization and mastery emerges in Book 1 when Ish encounters a community of Black farmers. Reflecting the spirit of domination—or white supremacy—that accompanied the rise of the West, Ish thinks briefly about remaining there and dominating these people, who he assumes are “simple” and “passive”: “‘Here,’ he reflected, ‘I might be a king in a little way, if I remained’” (58). In the same chapter, to reassert his feeling of mastery over both animals and the dire situation that he encounters after the disaster, Ish kills a cow and her calf for the meat. However, he is also aware that his act was excessively violent; already the reflective Ish has embarked on a journey toward the renunciation of the spirit of mastery.
Interpersonal mastery is explored in the sub-plot involving Charlie that ends in the community killing Charlie under Ish’s leadership. Ish recognizes that the charismatic Charlie, a threat to Ish’s plans for the community’s gene pool, is also a threat to Ish’s role as the group’s leader. He reflects, “But in any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under” (243). Ish realizes that in the new society, the post-civilizational one of the Tribe, the skills that made him a leader are less valuable, including his intellect and his scientific training. Similarly, in Book 3, Chapter 2, Ish notes that the men of the newly emerging society are less interested in conflict and competition.
Civilization’s struggle to control nature is a fundamental motif. Indeed, Ish’s idea of civilization is that it emerges precisely out of this struggle and is coincident with it. He comes to realize, however, that despite the human delusion that humankind has mastered nature, it is, in fact, a battle that nature will win inevitably. The Tribe is able to hold nature at bay for a while with the aid of some remaining technology: Guns keep the mountains lions away, glass and metal containers prevent the rats from eating all of the food, the Jeep allows Richard and Robert to by-pass many obstacles on their way east. Eventually, the guns run out of ammo, the batteries die, tires go flat, and packaged food cannot last forever.
These eventualities force the survivors to adopt “primitive” tools and methods, such as bows and arrows and clothing made of animal skins, but they also come to live in a greater harmony with nature than before. For example, in book three, the new generation gains their bearings when they travel by following the sun, not by following the road atlas, highways, streets, and so on. When Ish looks out at the Oakland hills as he lies dying on the Bay Bridge, he is struck by a stark contrast: the crumbling bridge in the foreground and the eternal hills in the back. Only the hills will last, and even the most ardent disciple of human achievement must admit that, in the end, humans are dust, but “the Earth abides.”
The Role of Culture in a Cohesive Social Order
Culture means, roughly speaking, the beliefs, norms, customs, and other meaning-making activities of human societies. The disaster arrives primarily as a physical threat that has eliminated much of the population, but the disaster also decimates the culture of what the survivors come to call the “Old Times,” or the technological society of 20th-century America. Ish notes explicitly the importance of culture and the effects of its decimation in Part 1, Chapter 5: “Destroy the culture-pattern in which people lived, and often the shock was too great for the individuals” (77). Ish and the other survivors live not only in the material ruins of the past but in its more intangible cultural ruins, and as the generations pass, other cultural forms arise: beliefs, stories, traditions, and norms. Ish’s development as a character is bound up with his initial resistance to this process and with his eventual acceptance, late in life, of the more “primitive” culture that exists after the disaster.
In Book 1, Chapter 1, immediately after the disaster, Ish is hesitant to break into a newsstand out of respect for the tradition of property rights even though the town is empty, the shop owner is dead, and his need for information is more important than a broken window. Similarly, he reflects: “There was no particular reason, he realized, why he should sit in his own car rather than some other” (15). Ish evens stops at red lights in deference to traffic laws. The Tribe, at least initially, marks the passage of time by carving the years into a rock. Because time for them is effectively meaningless, they eventually stop doing this. The adherence to old rituals suggests a profound human need for order, even the illusion of order. While Ish frets about the adherence to some of these rituals as merely superstition (the children’s reverence for the hammer, for example), and he feels duty bound to disabuse them of these superstitions, he eventually sees the value in them. If he wants to rebuild civilization, traditions and rituals are part of it.
Ritual and tradition are far more than fancies or rote exercises, Ish realizes. They serve a distinct social and psychological function. The practice of repetition instills a sense of constancy and stability vital for confronting an ever-changing and potentially hostile world. It’s hard to imagine a more uncertain and anxious situation than the end of the world, and meaning-making cultural activities become ever more important as the survivors navigate that chaotic future. In Part 2, Chapter 9, the digression reflects on the importance of burial rituals: When humans abandon such meaning-making patterns, “then we shall no longer be men” (278). Thus, some of the survivors try to create religious practices, like George and Maurine. For Milt and Ann, the couple that Ish meets in New York, cocktail hour is their preferred ritual.
For Ish, giving the children a proper 20th-century education using the resources in the library is a way to preserve the cultural patterns of the old world. He insists on it even when the kids would rather be playing outside. Of course, as a scholar, Ish finds great comfort in the classroom environment, and he seeks to replicate that environment not only to educate the next generation but also to ease his own anxiety about the future. However, he eventually realizes not only the uselessness of what he is teaching them, but also that the very form of education that he employs is no longer relevant. What emerges instead, after he abandons class instruction, is a cultural practice that reflects the general tendency to atavism among the Tribe, or the return of “primitive” patterns: The men approach Ish with an offering and ask him to impart wisdom.
All such cultural norms, traditions, and rituals are necessary for a cohesive society—common practices instill common purpose and common identity—but these traditions take generations or even centuries to take root. A new world requires new cultural patterns, symbols, and meaning-making rituals, and by the novel’s end, Ish realizes that the Tribe is in transition from the cultural patterns of the “Old Times” to those of their own. When Ish finally accepts that he cannot rebuild the old world, he disposes of many of the old traditions and allows the future generation to discover their own.
