Station Eleven: Motifs 1 key example

In the original play, the aging King Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters. He’s deceived by the false flattery of his oldest children Regan and Goneril, and he banishes his innocent youngest daughter, Cordelia, because he sees her refusal to exaggerate her love for him as disloyal. This unpopular decision leads to betrayal and political chaos. It’s also the direct cause of Lear’s descent into madness, as he realizes too late that Cordelia was the only person who truly loved him.

By the play’s end, nearly every major character has died, and the few who remain have to rebuild their world from the ground up. One of the most explicit connections between the book and the play is Arthur’s role as King Lear, which he is acting in on the night of his death. This is where the novel begins, and the narrative regularly revisits in flashbacks. Arthur’s sudden collapse onstage foreshadows the larger collapse of civilization that follows the Georgia Flu outbreak. The chaotic transition from performance to reality in the flashbacks to that night—the audience is unsure if Arthur is still acting until the paramedics arrive—also reflects the thin boundary between order and chaos. The collapse of civilization also echoes the chaos that Lear’s actions cause, which eventually drives him to madness.

 In King Lear and in Station Eleven, after things collapse the world becomes unpredictable and dangerous. Just as Lear descends toward insanity after his daughters’ betrayals, the world of Station Eleven falls into disorder after the pandemic erupts. Also like Lear, characters in Station Eleven are forced to think about the impact of their actions and to agonize over what they might have done differently. Just as Lear only understands his mistakes when it is too late to fix them, characters like Kirsten (in the present) and Arthur (in the past) try to piece together the meaning of past events.

The shifting dynamics of leadership in Station Eleven similarly parallel the struggles for control in Lear. Some leaders, like the Prophet, take advantage of people’s fear and confusion to manipulate them into following their ideologies. The Prophet wields his power through fear and violence, convincing people they have a moral imperative to follow him. The Traveling Symphony, by contrast, operates on loyalty and the shared purpose of bringing beauty to the world. The Prophet’s version of authority only works as long as he is able to inspire fear and obedience, while the Symphony’s power is able to persist despite all the danger and challenges they face.