World War Z Themes

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks is a fascinating, albeit difficult, book to explain. While it does follow the same beats and plot of any zombie apocalypse story, it does craft out a narrative that is largely unique from any book preceding it. This can be due to the fact that this book isn’t presented as a first-person or third-person book but as an oral history that features multiple characters and plot lines. While this may be overstuffed for some, it does help to flesh out the largely unique, and particularly relatable, world World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War inhabits. The main problems that this book encounters is largely unremarkable characters and small interconnectivity. However, it is the themes that

Fear is of course the most common one as it is generally the theme that is almost universally shared in all media relating to zombies. The book does not break any new grounds in the discussion of fear from zombies. However, the fear that people experience from not being able to defeat the zombies is something largely unique in the story. It haunts the characters and motivates them to come up with new techniques to defeat this unscareable force. On the other hand, the main theme that this book makes largely its own is the theme of primitivism. It is pretty basic in regards to zombies, who are the very definition of primitive. Nevertheless, the main one that is particularly interesting is primitivism in regards to humans. Humans slowly began turning against one another, and with the explanations, it made total sense. They even had an scene that was implied to involve cannibalism, a line that humans would usually never dare to cross (Brooks 128-289). Primitivism shows us a nature that humans try to hide, and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War fully exploits that