"Now is the winter of our discontent..." and Station Eleven's Perpetual Snow

From the very beginning of the book, there is snow in Station Eleven. Arthur Leander’s death, driving the entire plot of the story and all of the relationships between the characters, occurs when a flurry of fake snow is falling on the stage. Not only that, but outside of the theater, there is snow falling too. It startles Jeevan, “...this echo of plastic translucencies that still clung to his jacket from the stage,” (Mandel 9). The sentiment is quite ironic, since stage snow is created to imitate real snow, but Jeevan sees real snow and is reminded of the fake snow. But the meaning behind snow and winter both in Station Eleven and in the history of literature assures the reader that Mandel’s choices of its placement in the story are very intentional.

In Thomas C. Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, he emphasizes the seasons’ importance in literature and how some of their subtextual meanings have remained constant over time: “Maybe it’s hard-wired into us that… winter [has to do] with old age and resentment and death,” (Foster 186). Knowing this, readers of Station Eleven should expect Arthur’s heart attack to be fatal.

Focusing specifically on what the snow means in relation to Arthur Leander’s death (because if we didn’t, this post would be about as long as the novel itself), it has bittersweetness to it that is very emotive for the audience. In the final pages of the book, when the evening of Arthur’s death is discussed through his own point of view, he sees the snow falling all around him and thinks “it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen,” (Mandel 329). Reading the novel, it’s nearly impossible not to get attached to Arthur’s character since so much of the story revolves around his life and how it influenced others. The way Mandel frames the pages where Arthur dies (from his point of view) leaves the audience with the impression that this line about how beautiful the snow is the last thought Arthur has because it is the very last sentence in the chapter.

As he does often in his book, when Foster is discussing the meanings of snow, he emphasizes just how many there may possibly be: “Snow is clean, stark, severe, warm (as an insulating blanket, paradoxically), inhospitable, inviting, playful, suffocating, filthy (after enough time has elapsed).” All of these descriptions can be relevant to Arthur’s life and death with the symbolism of snow:

1. Cleanliness applies (with Arthur’s incessant thoughts on his final day of life about wanting to start anew by leaving his current life and spending as much time as possible with his son Tyler in Israel).
2. Starkness applies (especially by the Cambridge English Dictionary definition of starkness, “the quality of being empty…”, because Arthur is definitely in a state of emptiness after reflecting on the course of his life).
3. Severity applies (since everything about death by heart attack implies “great pain, difficulty, damage, etc.” and is “very serious”, as the Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word “severe”).
4. Warmth “as an insulating blanket” applies (mostly because of the juxtaposition presented of snow being cold but the stage being warm from stage lights; Just moments before he dies, Arthur describes how onstage “the lights were too close, too hot, and sweat poured down his back” (Mandel 326)). 
5. “Inhospitable” applies (if you think of snow being difficult to live in like how making a living by acting onstage, whether you’re famous or not, is a harsh life).
6. “Inviting’ applies (because of the eerie beauty and allure of the snow, which is like the eternal human fascination with death).
7. Playfulness applies (quite literally, because the three little girls were just playfully running around onstage before Arthur died onstage, which is an interesting contrast of youth and death).
8. “Suffocating” applies (because asphyxiation leads to death, as the snow is directly related to Arthur’s death).
9. Even filthiness applies (since Arthur is in a “costume of rags” in the scene where he dies, because it is when his character has gone mad).

When Jeevan steps outside after Arthur has died and is startled by the real snow all around him, we as readers already have the association with Mandel’s writing and how snow is related to death in some way. Perhaps we should have expected, then, that more death was to come that evening. Because it definitely does; this is the same night that the Georgia Flu sweeps the nation, and the population is wiped out to an extent that it never has been before.

Works Cited

Cambridge English Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/. Accessed 18 Aug 2019.

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines. Harper Perennial, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2014.

Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2014.

Shakespeare, Richard III (1.1.1).