Survival is Insufficient’: Imagining Utopia within Dystopia in Station Eleven, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Human Acts

Abstract

Dystopian fiction may portray destruction, decay and suffering within its narrative aura but it also makes room for utopian imagination to sprout and grow. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? speculate a world ravaged by a deadly pandemic and a nuclear fallout respectively, while Han Kang’s Human Acts depicts the historical events of the bloody and chaotic May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea. In the first chapter of this dissertation, Kermode's theoretical lens on apocalyptic fiction from The Sense of an Ending helps understand the existential dilemma of the characters in the aforementioned novels immediately after the crises, while the theory of state control from Louis Althusser's On The Reproduction Of Capitalism reveals the inherent binary conflicts within the narratives. In the second chapter, the theoretical perspectives of solastalgia, salvage and postmemory by Glenn Albrecht, Evan Calder Williams and Marianne Hirsch respectively shed light on the survival mechanisms that aid the characters to overcome their post-crisis distress, pick up the fragmented objects and ideas of value and transmit their knowledge, ideologies and sociocultural concepts to the next generation. Utilizing Fredric Jameson’s theoretical framework on utopian fiction from Archaeologies of the Future, the final chapter of this paper analyzes the fragmented utopian impulses existent within the three novels to prove that these impulses within the characters’ individual and collective psyches drive the dystopian narratives out of their initial chaotic backdrops towards a more positive and uplifting tone, hence breaking away from the constraints of their preconceived narrative genre. Overall, this dissertation aims to prove that dystopian fiction does not necessarily endorse meaningless suffering but aspires to find meaning within meaninglessness and purpose within chaos.