Tedium and Terror: Dreading Narration in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

Abstract

Critics of Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One (2011) have treated its post-zombie-apocalypse setting as a futural standpoint for critiquing the present. This article argues that Whitehead equally deploys this setting as an allegory for the lived experience of historical and personal temporality in late capitalism. The fundamental quality of that lived experience is boredom, but in a particularly contemporary instantiation, which takes into account the endless bombardment of “events” in 24/7 networked time. Drawing upon and also revising Frank Kermode’s theory of narrative eschatology, I argue that Whitehead’s novel offers a form of boredom “after the end” predicated on dread, understood as a mix of tedium and terror. The article concludes by considering this form of dread as indicative of a postnarrative moment that calls for new forms of storytelling.