Morehead State University
“Kill the Brain and You Kill the Ghoul”: The Zombie Motif in Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green
Institution
Morehead State University
Faculty Advisor/ Mentor
Layne Neeper
Abstract
Near the end of Stephen Wright’s novel Meditations in Green, Wright likens the Vietnam-era U.S. military to one of the flesh-eating ghouls in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead by associating the military’s intelligence department with the brain, the weak-point of Romero’s ghouls. By retroactively applying the concept of the military as a zombie to the preceding portions of the text, one finds that the military as portrayed by Wright exhibits other traits of Romero’s creatures, including greatly heightened levels of hostility and homicidal intent, as well as the seeming loss of individuality and higher thought processes. One can also see that these traits persist into the post-war lives of some of the novel’s characters, indicating a permanent alteration to the self akin to the transformation that afflicts the undead in Night of the Living Dead and thereby cementing Wright’s image of the military as a dehumanizing transformative force.
“Kill the Brain and You Kill the Ghoul”: The Zombie Motif in Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green
Near the end of Stephen Wright’s novel Meditations in Green, Wright likens the Vietnam-era U.S. military to one of the flesh-eating ghouls in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead by associating the military’s intelligence department with the brain, the weak-point of Romero’s ghouls. By retroactively applying the concept of the military as a zombie to the preceding portions of the text, one finds that the military as portrayed by Wright exhibits other traits of Romero’s creatures, including greatly heightened levels of hostility and homicidal intent, as well as the seeming loss of individuality and higher thought processes. One can also see that these traits persist into the post-war lives of some of the novel’s characters, indicating a permanent alteration to the self akin to the transformation that afflicts the undead in Night of the Living Dead and thereby cementing Wright’s image of the military as a dehumanizing transformative force.