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

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order” (200). The premise for constant exposure to the grotesque in this case is an
inability to escape decomposing corpses with a ceaseless compunction to consume the
living. Understandably, there is an inherent social commentary in this pervasive
condition.
As we learn in chapter three, “Safety Behind Bars,” no one is exempt from this
transformation. Regardless of cause of death, any and all individuals will reanimate
unless their brains have been destroyed. Therefore coping with the loss of a loved one
can be even more difficult than it would be normally because expiration must be
repeated. By complicating the expected trajectory of the body, Kirkman has also
transformed it into something wholly different from previous associations of it as
representative of an individual and organism. This is true for the characters within The
Walking Dead like Shane, whose existence was written before this condition existed.
Accordingly, readers cope with this inversion of normalcy in the same time as characters
like Rick for example. The metamorphosis makes the body into a morbid agent of
perpetual destruction. Rather than being categorized by personality or behavior, the
transformation following death erases all earlier sense of identity. Distinction between
bodies of these walkers is only possible through the recognition or differentiation of
physical features. Cavarero categorizes a similar type of violent transformation: “Horror
has to do precisely with the killing of uniqueness, in other words it consists in an attack
on the ontological material that, transforming unique beings into a mass of superfluous
beings whose murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat” (43). This means no
trace of former relationships remains known to the transformed bodies which were once
familiar to the living. Once metamorphosed, all bodies simply become a threat. Though