Everyday Zombies: Ethics and the Contemporary in “Sea Oak” and “Brad Carrigan, American”

Abstract

George Saunders’s investigation into the nature of contemporaneity often features animated corpses—zombies—who rage against the ways their lives had been rendered inconsequential by neoliberalism. Rather than instigating an apocalyptic social breakdown (as traditional zombies do), Saunders’s “undead” have little, if any, durable agency; furthermore, they are disavowed by mainstream American culture: if their wretchedness was to be taken seriously, this act would repudiate the pervasive American ideology of “positive thinking,” an ethos that is endorsed by neoliberal corporations because it severely circumscribes the possibility of existential experience and political emancipation. “Sea Oak” presents a sincere exploration of nihilism and examines how the sources of this nihilism are partially to be found within neoliberalism. “Brad Carrigan, American” embodies a particular use of the uncanny that derives from the philosophical dilemmas posed by temporal “simultaneity,” problems largely inherited from the Holocaust’s disruption of Western ontology and ethics.

Let us guard against saying death is the opposite of life; the living creature is simply a kind of dead creature, and a very rare kind.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 109