"I am legend."

I think that the last line in I Am Legend did a really good job of summing up many of the themes that we’ve been discussing in this class.  When he said “I am Legend”, it shows us that Neville finally understood what was going on, although it took him the entire book to figure it out.  Basically, the world was changing.  Since the introduction of the virus, everything changed which becomes apparent right away (and is to be expected in this kind of post-apocalyptic story).

At first, the major change seems to be that Neville is now all alone in the world.  He is the last surviving, uninfected human.  I feel like the point of these kinds of stories is to pose the question, “What would it be like if the world you knew was suddenly turned upside down?”  It seems to be a ‘worst case scenario’.  Most of us would have no idea how to deal with such a situation in the first place, and, speaking personally, I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t have the know-how to survive for more than 10 minutes in a similar situation.  I think that this element is what introducing the first feeling of the unknown, which in turn gives us our first feeling of fear in the novel, and is carried on by the way the Neville has to push himself everyday, just to survive.  It’s a pretty scary situation.

Things really start to get interesting as the story drew closer and closer to its conclusion.  Before Neville delivers his last lines, he meets a woman who changes everything for him.  After having her locked up for a while, and then setting her free, Neville is knocked out by a woman who he suspected of being infected.  When he wakes up, he finds a note from the girl, Ruth, which explains everything to him.  He finds out the infected had already begun to rebuild society, and that they have actually come to fear Neville because of how many infected he had killed.

This twist in the book really drove home a lot of the underlying themes of this book.  The entire book, Neville has the mindset that he is the last living human being.  But then he finds out that he is actually just the last human of his kind, but that the rest of the world has already started to move on without him.  This could be reflective of race relations in America at the time, and how people were dealing with it.  The world was changing a lot during that time period, and, for better or worse, some people just weren’t ready for it, and many people resisted it.

This is how Neville fit into the new society.  He spends the entire book thinking about how threatening the vampiric creatures are to him, but he never considered that he was actually affecting the development of what would probably eventually become the new world.  At the end of the book, Ruth comes back to Neville and all of this becomes clear to him.  She says that his execution will be necessary, and she brings him 2 pills to “make it easier”.  As he takes them, he says those last lines to himself. “I am legend.”  He realized that there is no longer a place for him in the world.  He seemingly sees the irony in his situation as he chuckles to himself before he dies; while he spent the entire book thinking that he was surround by monsters, he now realizes that, in the new society, he himself with be built up as a monster himself.