ABSTRACT
In a context of increasing wildfires, powerful hurricanes, pandemics, and climate change, the idea of disaster is exigent. Connie Willis’s Passage, while overtly exploring near-death experiences (NDEs) from multiple perspectives, contextualizes the individual traumas throughout with examples of disasters ranging from the Hindenburg explosion to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The notion of disaster makes possible a reading of Willis’s Passage that goes beyond the individual and examines disaster as a historical event, as fits with much of her other time-travel-oriented work, but also has implications for the idea of a natural or environmental disaster. The primary question is how one responds to disaster. Again, this is framed through individuals and focuses on disaster as more individual than systemic, but the ways people respond to disaster become part of the larger system that shapes disaster culturally. Utilizing work in disaster studies and affect theory, this essay argues that in Passage a disaster is not just an event, but is a constant state of being, so forms of response to disaster are a matter of daily ethics and communication that have serious ramifications for how crises in the world are addressed.
