How are we then to understand message on each leaf, doubly inscribed leaf that forces us from botanical realm of organic continuity to that of written text: how are we to read this volume of scattered pages? --Carol Jacobs on Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1) MARY SHELLEY'S THE LAST MAN, BEGUN IN 1824 AND PUBLISHED IN 1826, embraces a confluence of narratives that resists an interpretative closure or categorization: combining tales of multiple love-triangles, political debates, psychological struggles, historical vignettes, records of war, bits of travelogues, text is cast as a dystopian vision invoking a classical myth. In addition, novel enfolds author's psychological state into fabric of narrative: Sibyline prophecy of war-torn, plague-ridden, desolate prophesied in text reflects Mary Shelley's emotional inscape as she mourned Percy's death, a loss which threatened her sense of human agency. The novel's formal hybridity also calls into question various thematic or conceptual boundaries and fixed identities, including those of self, gender, class, race, religion, and nationality. The phantasmatic coalescing of personal tragedy with apocalyptic extinction of humanity destabilizes hierarchical power dynamics and nullifies any illusory hope for humanistic redemption. In light of such a textual explosion, it may be helpful to attempt to examine rhetorical devices and ideological impulses that underpin web of reality and fantasy, history and vision, destabilizing drives and (un-)conscious elisions. With premise of apocalypse, text relentlessly insists on radical freedom through decomposing figure of plague, the vast annihilation that has swallowed all things--the voiceless solitude of once busy earth (193). (2) Despite text's almost transcendental leap beyond fixed identities, however, political unconscious of racialized British-Eurocentrism persists. This paper investigates conjuncture, equivocation, and explosion of these two aspects. On one hand, textual deconstruction of human agency (the autonomy of consciousness-of-the-self) in general and British nationalist subject in particular propel narrative towards apocalyptic fall of human race. On hand, remnants of British white subjectivity manifest in racialized configurations of color. In words, The Last Man's textual insights into limits of (British, Eurocentric, Western, white) consciousness through dystopian prophecy of borderless society coexist with its blindness to a racial ideology that appropriates different races to maintain a wholesome oneness. Examining an array of textual figuration and disfiguration, this paper locates historically-specific, ideological moments couched in futurist narrative of post-human perspective and textual rhetoricity of its delimitation. Crossing Boundaries, Annihilating Identities The text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing: thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but an explosion, a dissemination. --Roland Barthes, From Work to Text In The Last Man, plague is set up as other to logic and concomitant social relations that exist in late 21st century, when story begins, and it unleashes numerous literal and figurative boundary-crossings. The boundaries crossed have been essential to maintaining Eurocentric domination and conquest. When plague breaks out, characters repeatedly assert that a breach has been made and that Rubicon has been crossed (188). The plague rapidly breaks loose various fixed identities or dynamics, unsettling, dislocating, and displacing existing chain of identities and events. (3) With plague, England's historical antagonism against Ireland and ambivalence towards America are displaced by awareness of humanity's common bond. …