Young Adult Literature: Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic

Titles Discussed

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Genre Overview

The word “apocalypse” is an ancient Greek term referring to an unveiling of new knowledge, typically used in the context of the destruction of the world in the Judeo-Christian traditions of the end-time. While the apocalypse and the “end of the world” as religious and mythological concepts have existed across cultures for centuries, the modern sense of apocalyptic fiction truly became popular following World War II, when the use of nuclear weapons made the possibility of worldwide destruction seem a newly viable threat. From the mid-twentieth century onward, advancing weapons technologies, the human impact on the environment, resource scarcity, and similar contemporary threats fueled the public interest in apocalyptic fiction. Novels explored diverse scenarios, from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963) and its imagined world where all water freezes at room temperature to Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and its devastated landscape following an apocalypse of unspecified origin. Apocalyptic movies and television shows have likewise flourished, particularly following a number of popular science-fiction apocalypse movies in the 1970s, including Omega Man (1971), Mad Max (1979), and the various sequels to 1968's Planet of the Apes.

Young adult apocalyptic and postapocalyptic novels have similarly become increasingly popular, beginning roughly in the second half of the twentieth century. While the high entertainment value of the genre makes it a good fit for many younger readers—most apocalyptic novels are action focused, with plenty of suspense, and feature characters in a constant struggle for survival—there are also some clear metaphorical overlaps between the young adult experience and the apocalyptic experience. In the apocalypse, older generations have gone astray, resulting in the destruction of the earth, and surviving characters are left to survive and rebuild. Young adults likewise stand on the edge of inheriting society, and the apocalyptic scenario heightens the danger they face, the failings of older generations, and the potential for absolute change (or rebuilding).

In the twenty-first century, postapocalyptic novels such as James Dashner's The Maze Runner (2009) have become best sellers and are often adapted into popular film franchises. Other novels, such as Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now (2004) and Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It (2006), take an different approach, focusing less on action and more on the emotional adjustments the characters face. In all three of these novels, the cause of the apocalypse remains obscure, redirecting the focus to the survival of the teenage protagonists and their future rather than the specific politics of their pre-apocalypse world.

Works

The Maze Runner is written in the tradition of many science-fiction apocalyptic narratives that center on action, suspense, and entertainment. Rather than explore the apocalypse itself, the novel takes place in a seemingly postapocalyptic world about which readers and characters both know very little. The main character, Thomas, awakes one day in a mysterious Glade at the center of a towering Maze. The Glade is filled with other teenage boys who, like Thomas, remember nothing of their lives before they entered this landscape. The other boys have developed a new society, with strict rules, a loose government, and defined roles for everyone. As Thomas learns about this new reality and navigates the Maze's many dangers, however, the Maze itself begins to change, eventually pushing him to escape with a small number of other teenagers. Once free, they find the Creators of the Maze, but only moments pass before soldiers enter and kill the Creators. At the novel's end, Thomas is told that a disease is threatening all of humanity, leaving him with as many questions as answers.

From the opening scene in which Thomas enters the Glade to the final, confusing moments of violence as the Creators die, the experiences of the characters in The Maze Runner are defined by their lack of information. As apocalyptic scenarios typically involve a sudden absence of power structures, with governments and other societal forces crumbling, Thomas finds himself in a familiar trope, struggling to establish order and reason in a world where both seem to have disappeared. As the novel progresses, the challenges facing Thomas become not simply about the violent creatures in the Maze but about the process of reconstructing order with the other teenagers trapped there, as cooperation and trust are necessary for their safety. However, the former societal powers (mysterious as they are) are revealed to have survived whatever apocalyptic scenario rages outside the Maze, so the moment of freedom and escape turns out instead to be only a moment in which the characters are thrown into yet another apocalyptic scenario. This creates a constant tension between the young protagonists, struggling to build a society from a new logic, and the older figures of power who manipulate and exploit the teenagers. As a metaphor for the young adult experience of forming a better society as older generations pass, this makes the revelation of the novel's end particularly troubling, suggesting that adults will endlessly continue to intervene and require the young adult characters to overthrow them.

The presence of adults in How I Live Now likewise has the potential to stifle and destroy younger communities, although their absence results in an idyllic setting rather than the terrifying reality of the Glade. Focusing on fifteen-year-old Daisy, the novel is split into two parts. In the first, Daisy is sent from New York to England to live with her cousins in a remote region, her father wanting her to be safe in the face of an impending global war. When her aunt leaves on an extended work vacation, the teenagers and children are left on their own. Daisy finds herself in a pastoral world of beauty where she falls in love with her cousin Edmond, their romance bringing greater joy without the scrutiny of adults. Eventually, however, the war intrudes, at first in the form of food shortages from distant battles. Soon after, soldiers of unknown origin come and take over the farm, splitting up Daisy and Edmond by sending them to separate group homes. After the brutal violence of the war, the narrative moves forward five years, with Daisy returning to England a changed person and finding Edmond emotionally devastated by the war years. Together and older, they must heal each other and build a new life.

Although both sections are narrated by Daisy, they are written in markedly different styles, with changes in the character's voice indicating the emotional toll the war has taken on her sense of self. In the idyllic, rural opening, Daisy speaks with constant slang and sarcasm; even the beautiful setting of the countryside is given cynical treatment, the home life described as one that does not “exactly remind you of Little Women even on our best day.” By the second half, Daisy is less likely to rely on humor or vernacular language. Instead, although she is brought back to the beauty of the rural environment and is reunited with her first love, her voice remains mature, steady, and serious. This split suggests that it is not the country home itself that allowed the youthful joy and cooperation of the prewar days but rather the absence of adult influence. Now that the war (and the adults who are behind it) have permanently altered the landscape and the interior world of the characters, Daisy and Edmond are unable to simply return to their old mode of existence. While Thomas and the characters of The Maze Runner find themselves thrown into one apocalyptic scenario after the next, the challenge for Daisy is instead how to live a postapocalyptic life, one in which it seems that the damaging influence of adults will never be undone.

In Life as We Knew It, the apocalyptic violence comes in the form of natural disasters, which displaces the sense of adult failure and instead creates a small family unit of mixed ages struggling to survive together. The fifteen-year-old protagonist, Miranda, lives in a Pennsylvania town, and her greatest concerns are her crush on a boy from the swim team and an ankle injury that has made it impossible for her to ice-skate. When an asteroid hits the moon and causes massive environmental disasters on Earth, these concerns seem minor as she slowly finds herself fighting to survive alongside her family and friends. As a long, cold winter settles, Miranda and her family struggle to ration food, stay warm, and fend off disease. While the survival of individuals and of society itself suddenly becomes uncertain, Miranda bonds more tightly with her family, finding hope through mutual support.

The apocalypse as it unfolds in Life as We Knew It is in many ways an inversion of several popular contemporary apocalypses. With no human origin for the disaster, the need to overthrow previous generations is gone, and as such, the characters largely turn to already existing modes of survival and strength in order to sustain themselves rather than inventing entirely new ways to be. Notably, while it still presents a scenario in which Miranda must rise to fulfill adult responsibilities, her task is not to reinvent society but simply to exhibit strength and optimism when she is the only member of her family to avoid a potentially deadly virus that sweeps through town. Ultimately, Life as We Knew It is an apocalypse story that affirms its characters and their ways of life rather than insisting on revolutionary actions. Solutions and methods from the past must be drawn from in order to achieve an optimistic ending.

All three of these apocalyptic scenarios draw on different contemporary political realities: government surveillance and control in The Maze Runner, war and terrorism in How I Live Now, and natural disaster in Life as We Knew It. While the novels allow readers to confront these fears, each novel remains focused on the choices that its respective protagonist must make. The books do not provide clear answers for how to live in a new reality; Miranda's answers turn to family and Thomas's to rebellion against authority, and both come with their own advantages and their own dangers. What the stories do reveal is a glimpse of the emotional growth and turmoil an apocalypse might bring about—turmoil that echoes the general anxieties inherent in entering adulthood and staking a claim in the world, apocalyptic or not.

Conclusions

Although nearly every culture exhibits fears of an apocalyptic event or events, those concerns seem especially heightened in Western society in the early twenty-first century. Political debates about the possibility of natural disasters due to global climate change, of nuclear- or chemical-fueled terrorist attacks, and of devastating scarcity and droughts all present these cataclysmic visions as viable realities.

Young adults, then, increasingly must consider the possibility that they will inherit a devastated world and that their future will involve rebuilding society rather than continuing it as it was. The genre of apocalyptic literature will likely hold its popularity, especially as the action-oriented nature of many apocalyptic plots make them easy source material for mainstream movies. While some critics fear that the popularity of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic literature indicates a pessimistic, doomed mentality in younger generations, it is also important to remember that young adults almost always serve as symbols of hope and future for these worlds. Even in the violence-drenched ending of Maze Runner and the emotionally shattered reality of How We Live Now, the youth still represent the possibility that things might be not only be different in the future, but improved. Because of this, the young adult fixation on apocalypses also indicates an insistence on optimism despite seemingly desperate political and cultural realities, the literature prepping younger generations to persevere no matter how broken or harsh the world they inherit becomes. This sense of survival ultimately aligns the genre with the biblical sense of the apocalypse, with the younger generation experiencing the unveiling of truth that will lead to a better world, even if that world exists as nothing more than hope in the novel itself.

Bibliography

Craig, Amanda. “It's No Fun Being a Girl.” Rev. of Dirty Work, by Julia Bell, and Life as We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Times 10 Mar. 2007, Features sec.: 15. Newspaper Source. Web. 30 Apr. 2015. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nfh&AN=7EH0485454597&site=ehost-live>.

Paik, Peter Y. From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Reeve, Philip. “The Worst Is Yet to Come.” School Library Journal Aug. 2011: 34–36. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 Apr. 2015. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=64135267&site=ehost-live>.

Bibliography

Hammond, Jeffrey. “The Sense of an Ending: Farewell to the Apocalypse.” River Styx 88 (2012): 8–17. Literary Reference Center. Web. 30 Apr. 2015. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=83530753&site=ehost-live>.

Miller, Laura. “Fresh Hell.” New Yorker. Condé Nast, 14 June 2010. Web. 30 Apr. 2015. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/06/14/fresh-hell-2>.

Watkins, Susan. “Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary Women's Fiction.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 23.2 (2012): 119–37. Literary Reference Center. Web. 30 Apr. 2015. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=76142945&site=ehost-live>.