![]() The barricade is the only metaphor left in this mess. Lieutenant admits as much when he says "'That wall out there has to work. ![]() If New York City becomes a symbol of human hope and resilience after the plague, the wall around Zone One serves as a symbol for the divide between the humans and the skels. At the conclusion of the novel, however, it is made clear that because New York could not be brought back, the prospect of human survival is dim. As Lieutenant declares in a conversation with Mark, "if you can bring back New York City, you can bring back the world" (p. ![]() After the plague, the city becomes a very different symbol: a symbol of human resilience and regeneration. This rendering of the city is juxtaposed sharply against the city after the plague, a city that has been boarded up and emptied of people. To Mark, the city represents the ingenuity and achievement of humankind, where a single person was just "a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock (p. In the flashback scene at the beginning of the novel, Mark imagines New York as a "magnificent contraption" made "bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea" (p. ![]() It's not just the main setting of the novel's action–it's also a powerful symbol whose meaning changes throughout the novel. New York City plays a prominent role in Zone One. ![]()
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