Race Masculinity The Cold War Science Vampires or Zombies Indistinct Boundary Between Monsters and Humans Other Web Sites of Interest
Race: While Matheson's novel takes place in the late 1970s, it was written in 1954 during the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The Birmingham Bus boycott began in December of 1954. On pp. 31-32, Matheson compares vampires to blacks in his solitary speech reminiscent of Shylock's speech in The Merchant of Venice. He talks about how vampires are no different from anyone else. This is reminiscent of anti-racist rhetoric of the 1950s. But the narrator isn't buying his own sarcastic rhetoric and keeps on killing vampires.
Masculinity: According to Nancy Chodorow in her book The Reproduction of Mothering, the basic masculine experience is to see one's self as disconnected from the world, while the basic feminine experience is to see one as connected to the world. Robert Neville whole life, post vampire, is about this masculine sense of self. (But this theme seems to run through a good bit of Matheson's work, especially his other famous novella, The Incredible Shrinking Man.) Perhaps this masculine sense of self is what has allowed him to survive on his own for so long. This is also why the vampires he singles out as particular objects of his fury are women. The women vampires who come to his house at night are immodest temptresses, and it ultimately a vampire woman who is his downfall. These women make him feel the true horror of his condition--isolated, with no connection to any living thing. This feeling is only relieved by the arrival of a dog, who ultimately die since he can't be a fitting substitute for human companionship. It's this masculine sense of self that has ultimately made Robert Neville a dangerous outsider in the emerging society. He says that the vampires are pure animal when they kill, but Ruth reminds him that he is no different from those he kills as he has the same look on his face when he's killing one of them. The small civilization he's set up in his barricaded suburban home isn't enough to preserve civilization as he knows it, or to allow him to retain his own humanity.
The cold war: Robert Neville's house resembles a bomb shelter. The people who destroy him aren't that different than he is. They too are not quite vampires, but are instead, people who can fight the infection and will set up a new society based on their rules. But they'll also kill Robert and anyone else like him who rejects their new communal society.
Science: Matheson's novella takes a scientific approach to the vampire and the zombie, something found in later works as well, such as The Hunger, Blade, and 28 Days Later. Robert uses the scientific method to discover what can be best used to destroy vampires, and ultimately discovers that it's caused by a mutant bacteria generated by some recent bombings. We're not sure what sort of bombings, but more than likely, they involved radiation. Like many of his contemporaries in the 1950s, Matheson was fascinated with radiation. In horror it could be responsible for a multitude of bad things. Scott Carey shrinks in The Incredible Shrinking Man because of radiation. In Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Nancy Archer becomes a giantess due to the same force, and radiation also reanimates the newly dead in the old version of Night of the Living Dead. Vampires are repelled by garlic not because it possesses any supernatural properties, but because it causes a chemical reaction with their changed blood. And vampires fear crosses not because of any power of Christ, but because in life, they were particularly religious and still retain a respect for these symbols in their undeath. The cross has no affect on Jewish or Moslem or atheist vampires. Unlike the townspeople in The Summoning, popular culture doesn't provide Robert Neville with a great deal of help for his vampire problem. Instead, Robert learns about vampires through trial and error.
Robert himself is legend because he is unaffected by the bacteria, probably because he was bitten by a vampire bat who more than likely had just come into contact with the virus, and passed a greatly weakened strain of it on to him, allowing his system to develop immunities. The bat didn't have the opportunity to infect others because Robert killed it.
Vampires or Zombies: Are the humans transformed by the virus vampires or zombies? While everyone transformed by the virus is allergic to garlic and craves blood, the brain damaged ones that both Robert and the new beings who execute him kill have a greater resemblance to zombies in their mindlessness. And with Robert gone, the remaining creatures could be said to represent the varying relationships to the means of production in our world. The zombies, those affected by the virus who are truly dead, are the working and under classes with the least privileged relationship to the means of production. They toil at repetitive tasks that can induce a mindlessness, and indeed, those who exploit their labor would like to assume that they are mindless, and therefore, deserving of their fates, and they might certainly be a more tractable workforce if they were truly mindless. The vampires or those affected by the virus but capable of thought are the privileged classes who live off of the blood of others.
Indistinct Boundary Between Monsters and Humans: Throughout the novella, Robert maintains that he does what he has to do because those creatures are monsters, and he is not particularly interested in Ruth's observations about how the look on his face when he is killing is similar to the look on the face of those he exterminates. But at the end of the story, Robert is forced to contemplate to what degree he too is a monster. He contemplates that in the new world order that is emerging, he will be their legend of the monstrous, just as the legend of the vampire has been his guiding metaphor throughout the years after the plague.
The Omega Man and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend