I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

 Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is a novella that mixes elements of horror and science fiction. The story begins in media res and relates the evolution of the protagonist, Robert Neville, as he strives to survive in a world permanently altered by a plague that has turned almost all mankind into vampires and has brought civilization to a screeching halt. The setting is Compton, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, in the mid to late 1970s, though Matheson wrote the book in the early 1950s (the first copyright shows as 1954).

Matheson employs third person, protagonist oriented, single angle, objective narration as defined by Lewis Turco in The Book of Literary Terms, 2^nd Edition.

Structurally, the author divides the novella into three parts of roughly 50 pages each, though Part III is much longer. Survival is always an issue throughout the story because of the ever-present dangers, but its the main course in Part I, which expands on the continuing shock Neville feels at his situation and the swirl of emotions largely centered on the loss of his wife, Virginia, and daughter, Kathy, his loneliness, and the hellish, living nightmare the world has become. Part II centers on Neville’s effort to investigate the nature of the plague and how to cure it amid all the impediments. Though he still exhibits strong emotional reactions, particularly rage, reason becomes more prevalent. Part III details his discovery of a woman during daylight who seems fully human but who is not. Ruth takes advantage of Neville’s loneliness and need for contact to learn what he’s discovered about the plague, pummels him when he tests her blood to see if she is infected, but also warns him she has come from a group bent on killing him. She urges him to leave. In this crisis, his moment of decision, Neville decides to stay. He has become a man of reason and believes he can survive among Ruth’s group.

The climax is the attack on Neville’s home by Ruth’s group. Only at the end, after witnessing the fury of their slaughter of the vampires, including Cortman, and maniacal efforts to break into his house, does he put up a jot of resistance. It comes too late and to naught, our protagonist is captured, and he awaits execution with the thought that their dread of him over slaying the living vampires (which they are; they’ve found a way that has stalled or cured the plague) has turned him into a legend for them.

The theme of I Am Legend is that man as the rational animal brews inside of himself a toxic, self-destructive mix of emotionalism and ignorance fueled by preconceptions that he can never escape and which fatally mar his existence. Matheson brings this to the forefront over and over again. It’s barely mentioned (as Bradbury in Farhenheit 451), but the bombing war generates or activates the germ and the dust storms. Neville cannot bring himself to cremate his wife, so he buries her when she dies from the infection only to return, seeking him out as food. He has to drive a stake through her and bury her again, which he deeply regrets. His emotions fuel his drinking which lead him to several careless acts: forgetting to set his watch, leaving his garage door open, and almost walking outside to be killed. He approaches the problem of the vampires through his preconceptions, so it takes him a long time to learn he could have killed them much more easily. Even once his reason-based investigation begins, Neville “experiments” on new ways to kill them. He pulls in one female vampire and asks her why she fears the cross. She bites him instead, so he throws her outside so the others can “feast” on her. Afterward, he pours alcohol on the bite wounds, “enjoying fiercely the burning pain in his flesh.” Although he criticizes the revival meetings that sprung up at the outset of the germ, he assumes a kind of messiah complex toward Ruth’s group even in the face of what she wrote to him.

The conflict in I Am Legend sheds light on how to understand the theme and Matheson’s idea of a monster. Since this is a survival story, we are predisposed to select a man vs. society conflict, and there is merit to such a selection. However, when one sees that Neville is alone much of the time, that the most vital parts happen in his interior, that the conflict he faces is the same for each person or creature, and that each cannot help but sow his or her own destruction, I think we have a man vs. himself conflict. This in turn suggests that the monster is man himself, crippled as he is by his emotions, ignorance, and preconceptions. Neville’s discovery of a strong psychological component to the vampires’ behaviors (though he did not live long enough to prove it) lays responsibility for what has happened squarely at the feet of man’s heart and mind. The problem isn’t with the existence of the vampires; the problem is man’s role in turning himself into a killer. Matheson’s creatures demonstrate this. The fully human Neville has become a killer (he even reached the point in the development of his reason when he still wants to kill Cortman anyway for sport). The partial humans have become killers. The vampires have become killers. The people who started the bombing war became killers.

Personal notes: Matheson’s effort to tie his story to historical plagues was unconvincing. Similarly, he treated the revival meetings superficially. Perhaps Matheson should have used “prejudices” instead of “preconceptions”. The name of Neville’s street comes from the Oklahoma panhandle. Willys wagons weren’t made after 1963. Matheson burns down the houses next to him because the vampires could leap to his roof from them. If they were that close, the fire would have spread to his house. I mean, it’s California!