54 pages • 1 hour read
Jeff HirschThe Eleventh Plague
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2011A 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
Individualism Versus Communalism as Survival Strategies
Much of the novel focuses on Stephen’s struggle to balance his desire to survive as an individual against his desire to find and support a community. Through Stephen’s character arc, the novel interrogates the seeming contradiction between these desires, emphasizing the challenges that both individualism and communalism may lead to. Characters like Jenny experience communal rejection and choose individualism to survive, while characters like Jackson choose empathy and try to see others—even those outside their community—as humans in need of support. Ultimately, the novel concludes that community, empathy, and cooperation are the only ways that humanity can continue to thrive.
While the novel does suggest that an individual, isolated life has its benefits, those benefits mostly take the form of pure physical survival. Stephen’s grandfather’s choice to trust no one keeps his family alive, while the choice to pursue community and to help others leads to Stephen’s father’s death. However, the individualism Stephen’s grandfather espouses shuts one off from human connection and, in this sense, leads to extinction: If Stephen’s father had heeded his father’s recommendation that they leave behind a dying woman—Stephen’s mother—Stephen himself would never have been born. Moreover, Stephen struggles to trust and value others as a result of his grandfather’s lessons, which significantly impacts his quality of life. Stephen’s life on the road is incomplete in other ways as well; he has no freedom to explore his interests because he must focus entirely on finding a way to feed himself. The novel therefore argues that pure individualism can lead to survival but not to life in a more meaningful sense.
Community in the novel takes the form of Settler’s Landing, a town that is shown to have both positive and negative effects on the shattered world in which it exists. The people in Settler’s Landing cooperate to feed one another, educate their children, and treat the sick, suggesting that communities can support and heal. However, the Landing also succumbs to the pressure of the Henrys and uses violence and underhanded tactics to ensure its own stability at the expense of other lives, which suggests that communities can also be isolated and intolerant of those outside of them. Notably, the novel suggests that the Landing’s flaws stem from the fact that it retains a strong element of individualism. The people who live there cooperate with one another only as much as is useful; when a person in the community becomes a risk to survival, they are forced out.
Both Settler’s Landing and Stephen must therefore learn that community is unconditional. Stephen, for example, accepts his role in the community by going to school and participating in their rituals, but he also recognizes the inherent value of those who don’t “deserve” life when he grieves Will’s death. The residents of Settler’s Landing similarly expand their understanding of community beyond their borders after the confrontation with Fort Leonard. The choice to keep the Henrys in the community rather than expel them demonstrates the change in mindset. Whereas once the Landing would have expelled the Henrys for jeopardizing its way of life, its decision to keep the Henrys and rehabilitate them shows a concern for how the community’s actions will impact those outside it; it also implies a recognition that all human life has value and the potential for change, which the novel posits as central to humanity’s survival.
The Lingering Effects of Abuse
Although Stephen’s grandfather dies before the novel’s opening, his abusive and harsh behavior continues to influence Stephen’s perspective and actions in the narrative present. This allows the novel to interrogate abuse’s complex, lingering effects on people’s capacity to thrive and function—effects exacerbated by the already traumatizing postapocalyptic world in the novel. Stephen’s grandfather emotionally and physically abused his relatives by controlling their actions, beating them when they displeased him, setting impossible standards for their behavior, and manipulating them into believing his way was the only way to live. As a result, both Stephen and his father developed coping mechanisms that allow them to survive in the short term but negatively impact them in the long run. Moreover, the abuse caused reversals in family dynamics that permanently affect the characters’ relationships and allow the novel to explore the adultification of children in a traumatic environment.
Those coping mechanisms and power reversals are particularly evident in Stephen’s relationship with his father, where the two coincide. Stephen’s practical, self-denying nature stems from his grandfather’s abuse, but so does his father’s more altruistic and emotional temperament—a response to his own father’s overbearing demands and cruelty. In response to the conflicting personalities of his father and grandfather, Stephen has had to mature quickly. His father, for example, displays a more typically adolescent disregard for future consequences when he encourages Stephen to eat fruit rather than sell it; though he eventually gives in to his father’s request, Stephen’s instinct is to shoulder the responsibility of a parent, using the fruit to secure their longer-term survival. Stephen’s awareness of his grandfather’s cruelty also renders him vulnerable to his father’s unintentional manipulation; comparing Stephen to his grandfather when he makes a practical or harsh decision is often enough to change his mind. Stephen thus cannot succeed; his father is unhappy with him when he is mature, and his grandfather is unhappy with him when he acts like a child. The shifting expectations of Stephen’s family members, who are his only real connections and influences for most of the novel, worsen his trauma.
Nevertheless, the novel suggests that recovery from abuse can occur when someone is removed from the abusive environment and chooses to find a new identity. To heal, Stephen must accept the welcome extended by the Green family and Settler’s Landing and let go of what he has inherited from his grandfather and father—without relinquishing what he values in either relative. Although the novel stresses that all people are capable of change, Stephen’s youth is an important piece of this; he is still young and flexible and therefore able to adjust his personality and choices to be better than those who came before him. In particular, Stephen chooses to end the cycle of violence perpetuated by his grandfather by pursuing community and peace—things his grandfather hated and rejected. By choosing to stay in the Landing and play baseball with his friends, Stephen demonstrates that recovery is possible and that not everyone trapped in cycles of abuse will continue in their own lives.
Tradition Versus Toxic Nostalgia in American Culture
Although “America” as a nation does not exist in the world of The Eleventh Plague, many of the characters in the novel still act as if it does, clinging to “traditional” American culture, beliefs, and traditions in a postapocalyptic setting. The novel uses the Landing’s commitment to preserving small-town America to interrogate what it is to be “American,” for good and ill. Throughout, the novel shows each tradition to be empty, not least because the world that once perpetuated it no longer exists. Instead, the novel argues for the invention of new traditions to match the needs of the new world.
Settler’s Landing has many traditions and habits that contrast sharply with the imagery in the rest of the book. Whereas the wilderness contains refuse and debris from life in the past—like fallen game systems and decrepit Starbucks stores—the Landing tries to preserve America’s past through Thanksgiving, baseball, and schools where students learn English literature. Circumstances have forced these traditions to deviate in some respects from their origins; for example, the residents of the Landing must eat venison at Thanksgiving rather than turkey, and they no longer remember the exact day the festivities conventionally took place. The fact that they have had to make these changes underscores the impracticality of old ways of life in the post-Collapse world, but the residents themselves do not recognize this reality. Even though they have all felt the pain of the Collapse, they try to pretend nothing has changed.
While the Landing’s preservation of tradition aims in part to solidify community bonds, it has a negative overall effect on the safety and health of the community. In their determination to “keep out” things that could shatter their illusory recreation of America, the residents resort to xenophobia and isolationism. Characters like Stephen and Jenny show the rotten core of this attempt at preserving the past. The Landing’s refusal to see Stephen (an outsider) and Jenny (a Chinese American girl) as valuable members of their community demonstrates a value system that is not only unjust but counterproductive in a postapocalyptic world. Nationalism, xenophobia, and isolationism do not benefit a small community. The Landing must overcome its prejudices to thrive, changing traditions to match the needs of the community rather than forcing the community to adapt to traditions. The baseball game with which the novel ends underscores this point. The community has not entirely abandoned tradition, but it has discarded the more harmful elements of American culture.
