Volume Two: The Doldrums

Reading Volume Two of The Last Man, I began to suspect that all of the characters are meant to be manifestations of one consciousness, rather than discrete amalgamations of several, and with the death of Raymond and Perdita, there is an ever-increasing pressure on Verney’s first-person narrative to maintain the momentum of this fantastical story. But where is the momentum? Another possibility that crossed my mind is that all of the characters are meant to be already dead (with the exception of Clara) in the past Verney looks back to as a then-present. While I know this isn’t the case, I mention it as a way of getting at the doldrums that, for me, direct, or don’t direct, the second volume.

Is it fair to say these characters are solipsistic and unlikable, largely one-dimensional even when saying one thing and doing another? (When Verney says it’s time to protect his wife girl Idris, cue a carriage for plague-infested London.) We ought to feel moved by Verney’s tale, but do we? Part of it may be that for all of the supposed intimacy of Verney’s circle, as characters, they have no emotional hold on us. I suspect that if the others had lived to read his account they might have protested, no, no—it wasn’t like that at all! Or not totally. At key points, Verney fails to understand Perdita, Adrian, and perhaps even Idris, if we can in fact view her as a character in Volume Two.

As Clare used sound to draw our attention to the inescapable fact of our mediating the natural world when we address it in art, is Shelley crafting an attenuated tale to explore our inability to mitigate or prepare for far-off environmental and biological concerns? In class, we’ve talked specifically about the confusion of time in Shelley’s novel as well as of the way environmental disasters receive more attention the more “spectacular” their time frames. A sustained and deadly plague would constitute a spectacular crisis, yet Verney’s tale takes forever. I don’t say so sarcastically; I suspect Shelley is up to something, though I’m not convinced of its final effectiveness. Though a lot of attention is paid to the environment, I’m not sure I’d say this is an environmental novel.

At the beginning of the volume, the natural world still seems to reflect Verney’s mental state: if he is sad, nature is “sad,” and if he is happy, nature is “happy.” By the end, the environment is often described as beautiful despite the repeated ravages of the plague on the population. It’s tempting to suggest that Verney arrives at a new understanding of humankind’s no-more-no-less-than position in the natural world, but the monotonous weight of the first person account immediately seems to undermine any such assessment. How does The Last Man fit into an ecocritical framework? How do you understand Verney as a narrator in relation to Shelley’s concerns?