I Am Legend | Themes

Survival at the Expense of Humanity

Among living things, survival is a fundamental instinct. Every character in the postplague world of I Am Legend tries to survive by whatever means necessary. Their unique needs dictate the means by which they must survive. The conflict among these needs is central to much of the story. In all cases, survival involves callousness and violence unthinkable under normal, civilized conditions. The novel explores how far the need to survive can separate the human from his or her humanity.

The fully human Robert Neville finds himself surrounded by the undead who want to kill him by night. To combat the monsters, he has turned his home into a garlic-laced fortress well stocked with everything to meet his basic needs. By day, he adopts the philosophy of kill or be killed. He hunts down the sleeping vampires and drives stakes through their hearts. Early on, he must steel himself for the task of killing his wife, who has returned from the dead. As he takes on the role of the vampire hunter, he further tamps down twinges of regret by reminding himself he has no choice but to kill. Whether his victims are the living dead or simply infected humans, he knows they all would come for him in the darkness. By the time he meets Ruth, his feelings of guilt and compassion have so atrophied he is surprised when she recoils in horror from his description of slaying vampires. Killing—Neville's means of survival—has become so routine that the righteousness or morality of it is not even questioned.

On the other hand, the victims of the germ—both the living and living dead—have their own needs that must be met. They, too, want to hold on to their own peculiar existence. In their sickness, they suffer no pangs of guilt or regret. Even Neville's wife, Virginia, comes back only for his blood. Whatever memories she retains of their past relationship have been reduced and recast: Neville is only food for survival. Similarly, his former neighbor and friend, Ben Cortman, and all the vampires who gather nightly outside Neville's home are driven by the need to feed. The single shred of humanity evident in Virginia and Cortman is their recognition of Neville when they call him by name.

As Neville discovers, there is a third group among the victims of the germ: those who are infected but know how to control it. They, too, want to survive and are faced with obstacles to overcome. They must organize themselves into an entirely new, workable society. Part of this depends on getting rid of the undead, which they do as callously as Neville and far more violently. Another part depends on publicly executing Neville. In their ruthlessness they are not so different from Neville but more pitiless. They carry out their butchery by night instead of dispatching the sleeping vampires in peace by day.

Yet in Ruth, there is hope that the spark of humanity remains in these new people and may be rekindled. As a representative of the new society, she is sent to spy on Neville, who has been deemed a monstrous killer of their kind. But she quickly develops understanding and affection for him and regrets the betrayal on behalf of her people. In their short time together, she also awakens Neville's own humanity for the first time in years, causing him to question if he has been wrong to kill the vampires so freely.

As Neville himself is dying, he appeals to Ruth's humanity, entreating her to do what she can to keep the society from becoming too brutal and heartless. He has come to understand the need to survive must not be twisted into a justification for violence and slaughter. This line, once crossed, destroys more than its victims. It becomes a way of life that poisons the soul and drains it of mercy.

Loneliness

Another dominant theme in I Am Legend is loneliness. As the only survivor of the plague of 1975, Robert Neville is the last human being on Earth. He is surrounded by a new race with all the attributes of vampires, and their only desire is to kill him. The novel explores how an average human would cope with isolation under such extreme conditions.

Humans are social beings. Their physical, mental, and emotional health requires social stimuli. After months of isolation, Neville's craving for human interaction is intense but cannot be satisfied. There's no one like him left, no one to talk to or with whom to share life. He will never again know or feel love. To his self-disgust, the sexual aspect of those cravings tempt him to surrender to the seductive invitations of female vampires gathered outside his house.

Neville's loneliness is exacerbated by fear. While he can see little point in living, he does not want to die and must be ever vigilant. To dull the loneliness and fear, he drinks and smokes to excess. But the horror of his situation is always there, ready to overwhelm him. When it does, his reaction is extreme. Rage, frustration, and self-loathing reflect the deep torment he endures and the fragility of his hold on sanity.

As the months progress, Neville focuses on survival and seeking an explanation, if not a cure, for vampirism. The latter activity is a distraction that fills the emptiness of his existence with a sense of purpose. However, his wretchedness is laid bare when the dog appears in April 1976. The sudden notion that he may not have to face the future alone fuels his desperation to find the dog and lure it into his home. When the dog sickens and dies, Neville buries, along with the dog, all hope of reprieve from his aloneness.

During the next few years, Neville seems to resign himself to this fate. He has no expectations of encountering another living being, animal or human. Then, with the appearance of Ruth, dormant emotions are awakened. Among them is the deep desire for human contact. Though his rational mind knows that Ruth is not to be trusted, he cannot help opening his heart to the chance for companionship and love. Her betrayal, therefore, is devastating. Neville must accept all over again there is no hope for him. He has lived in isolation, "a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death." In the end he will die alone. He is the last of his kind.

Persistent Memory

In Part 3, Chapter 20 Robert Neville silently laments, "How long did it take for a past to die?" He has met Ruth, awakening memories of his dead wife, Virginia, and a painful past he thought had been put to rest. He has deliberately chosen not to dwell on what he cannot change. Yet while conscious memories of these events may have dulled, emotional memories have not. Neville suspects Ruth is infected and fears what that will mean. He cannot forget what he experienced with the death of his child and, more significantly, his wife. He also cannot forget the joy of human companionship.

Throughout the novel, memory binds Neville to the past. It is a blessing and a curse. Memory is the tether to his human identity and sanity. It is essential to his survival. It reminds him of who he is, the human race he represents, and his responsibility to survive. If that tie snaps, he will give himself over to the vampires or commit suicide.

Memory also holds some clues to the riddle of vampirism's cause and cure. Thinking back on the development and spread of the plague sends Neville down different paths of investigation, seeking a cure. Time and again, he reviews the appearance and progress of the sickness, its rapid spread, the peculiar symptoms, and the undead state of the victims. But this reflection on the past is accompanied by grief.

For its curse, memory will not let Neville forget what has been lost, from his wife and child to all of humanity. Books and music are the triggers. They remind Neville that the sum total of humankind's knowledge and achievements could not save the world and has been rendered obsolete.

On his last day, Neville begs Ruth not to let the new society become too brutal. Witnessing the executioners' vicious, methodical slaughter of the vampires has been a shock. Like looking in a mirror, Neville sees in them what he has become. Killing is now routine in this new world, and the killers seem to be enjoying it. Memory tells him this is not as it should be. He fears the normalization of butchery and what it means for the future.

In death, Robert Neville passes into memory. It is a memory that will persist in legend. In the minds of the new people of Earth, he will stand as a symbol of fear and death. Their memory of Neville will mark this historic time when the world began again.

Identity

The plague of 1975 wipes out the human race and irrevocably changes what it means to be human. At the same time, it resurrects the vampire of myth and brings to light the true nature of the undead. As the germ behind the plague transforms its victims, it erases their human identity and replaces it with something alien. And in time the plague brings forth a new race of people on Earth who are neither human nor vampire, but a peculiar hybrid with their own unique attributes. Representing these three groups respectively (human, undead, and hybrid) are Robert Neville, Ben Cortman and Virginia, and Ruth. The arc of their stories raises several questions concerning identity. One question asks what it means to be human. Then there is the question of how identity can be so easily erased that humanity becomes something else. And perhaps most relevant to the novel is the question of who is actually a monster in this scenario.

Before the plague Robert Neville is a member of the human race. As such, he shares certain attributes with the rest of humanity. As the plague spreads, he is horrified by the vampirism that so swiftly emerges to transform society. The physical, mental, and spiritual degeneration of its victims seems monstrous. Though he is immune to the germ, Neville cannot escape the impact of its effects, from the death of his wife and child, to the demise of all fully human beings. Neville's identity as a human is irrevocably altered. He is utterly alone, a society of one. Robert the husband, father, friend, plant worker, and baseball fan has been replaced by Neville the ruthless vampire hunter and last human on Earth. While he struggles to find a way to exist in this new world, there is little to remind him of his old identity. There are no interactions with other humans or society in general to reflect and define who he is. His only contact with other beings involves fearing, fighting, or killing them. What it means to be human has been erased by necessity and the primal drive to survive in a dangerously altered world.

Ben Cortman and Virginia represent the humans who have died and returned as the living dead. They are less like traditional vampires and more like mindless zombies. The only residue of their former identity is their ability to recall Robert Neville's name and location. Whatever relationship they once shared with him has no meaning now. They only want his death and his blood. For these creatures, the body continues, but the mind does not. Along with memory and reason, their humanity has been erased. Nothing remains of the personalities once occupied in their bodies. They are puppets controlled by the germ, and the drive to feed and survive defines them now.

The third group competing for survival on Earth is made up of people infected by the germ but able to control it. These posthumans have retained many attributes of a human being. They remember life before the plague and exercise reason. They have drawn together in a community for mutual support and survival. They sustain themselves with normal food and appear healthy. They also share new identifying attributes: the paleness of their skin, their comalike condition when they sleep, their inability to tolerate extended periods in the sun, and their dependence on the pill that controls the germ.

The demands of their altered health and the wrecked world they live in have erased—or certainly suppressed—a vital component of their former humanity: compassion. Driven by necessity and the instinct to survive, they gleefully slaughter the living dead and plan Neville's public execution. No empathy tempers the ruthlessness with which they go about organizing the new society and cleaning up their world.

Related to identity is the question of who the real "monsters" are in this situation. Monsters are identified by their threatening "otherness"—they are deviations from what is supposed to be. They are the expression of things feared by the society in which they appear and contrast with the standards of "good" by which it judges.

When vampires begin to emerge from the plague, they are the monsters. They look and behave in ways that are horrifying to humans. Once alone in the world, Robert Neville takes it upon himself to hunt and kill them. But he is an army of one and now the deviant from the norm. He kills indiscriminately, never suspecting there are people who have mastered the sickness. He becomes their monster. In turn, Neville is sickened by a sadistic slaughter of vampires that makes him wonder what kind of society these new people will form. By standards of the old world, the new society seems populated by people for whom monstrous brutality is the norm.

Throughout the novel these social dynamics keep shifting. Therefore, no definitive answer is provided for the question, "Who are the real monsters?" It is up to the reader to decide.

The Nature of Legends

As the title I Am Legend suggests, a dominant theme of the novel is the nature of legends. Legends are built over time with the retelling of a tale, blending facts about real people or events with an ever-growing body of fictional embellishments. Legends will reflect the milieu of their place and time of origin. As the threads of fact and fiction are woven into legend, other threads of local lore also may be added to the story. In time the colorful fabrication becomes an intriguing piece of cultural heritage.

Unlike most legendary people, Robert Neville does not stand out in the world in which he was born. He's an "everyman" with a wife, child, good job, friends, and a love of music and sports. His unexpected immunity to the plague is the catalyst that will transform him into a legend. His first step along that path is to wage war on the vampires in much the same way as legendary, though fictional, vampire slayer Dr. Van Helsing from Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897). In this way Neville's legend will be built upon another.

To understand the vampire, Neville also looks to legends and lore. He attempts to cull clues from their stories that will scientifically explain and perhaps suggest a cure for vampirism. But in the meantime he becomes a thing of terror for those who are infected. He is the specter who murders them as they sleep.

Within the new posthuman society, fear feeds the stories about this killer until Neville's persona acquires mythic proportions. He also has the distinction of being the last of his kind. Neville's public execution will bring a reign of terror to an end, but the stories will live on. His legend will be woven into the culture of the new world.