Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

Bingham 41
and dismember other bodies (Cavarero 57, 103), the victims are defenseless and
randomly affected (ibid. 30-1, 76), and those who survive the aftermath are forever
altered through the damage of loss which changes their subjectivity and essentially
numbs them (ibid. 34, 43, 51). These conditions prompt a general reconsideration of
bodily existence.
In the actual world we experience, life is incontestably punctuated by three
events: conception, birth, and death. A condition in Kirkman's parallel universe is that
all people transform after death unless their brains are damaged or destroyed beforehand.
This robs humanity of its defining attributes: conscience and consciousness. Like the
victims of horrorism Cavarero describes, the people who become zombies suffer a loss of
their natural subjectivity. Understandably, characters in The Walking Dead have a hard
time coping with such a loss of identity. The undead are rarely called “zombies.” Instead
of referring to the creatures as monsters, terms which describe behavioral attributes like
“walker,” “roamer,” or “lurker,” are used to distinguish them from the humans. This
emphasis on naming may seem trivial but it strengthens our identification with the
characters as individuals by stressing the difficulty encountered by attempting to classify
the dehumanizing transformation which has changed their peers into monstrous entities.
The narrative is not a simple story of the living engaged in a futile fight against the dead,
but rather is a complex examination of human behavior and the fluctuation of moral
values in relation to the condition of one's physical status. As societal infrastructure
collapses, the maintenance of health and interpersonal relationships both become
complicated.
The Walking Dead inhabits a strange space between the radical and conventional.