ABSTRACT
The shipwreck is the metaphor to which Woolf turns most frequently in her writing. According to Laura Doyle, “no other English-language novelist’s work is as completely flooded with waves, water, wrecks, and drowning as Virginia Woolf’s”. Like Woolf’s works, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is replete with recurring images of ships and wreckage. This whole fictional world is shipwrecked. The novel opens with the arrival of the Georgian Flu seen through the eyes of Jeevan Chaudhary, who hides with his brother in a Toronto tower-block looking out on Lake Ontario. Miranda’s graphic novel is an elegy for a lost world that also becomes a guidebook for survival when it washes up on the shores of the post-collapse world; it is both a memento of the past and a fitting narrative for the times. The very structure of Station Eleven rejects historical or narrative progression.
