By reading Neville as completely bonkers by about mid-book (or even before the book’s start) is to forgive a lot of his failings, rantings, and bad decisions. My complaints about him are not to say his motivations don’t make sense, if one takes the idea of forced solitude to its logical conclusion: madness. Since Neville is the character the reader is stuck with, it’s frustrating that we’re stuck with such a dud. That lack of distinction, of course, is his hubris, and his illogical failure to recognize the source of his own immunity until well late in the game is also frustrating. This is not a forward-thinking, rational man, and yet he’s the last vestige of the uninfected human race.ĭuring the worst of the plague years, as he holes up alone with his classical music and alcohol (so much alcohol!), Neville veers from rational researcher to maudlin drunk and back again, interspersed with sweeps to clear the vampires, both living and dead, from his neighborhood. He has an unremarkable job, has to rely on a neighbor for carpooling, and is so sentimental that he can’t bring himself to dispose of his vampire-infected wife in such a way that he’ll save himself a lot of agony down the road. The true monster is Robert Neville, a fact which of course is his final revelation before death.Įven in flashback, as kind as Neville appears to be to his wife (though not particularly his daughter, who is an absent, fleeting thought to him both in life and death), he’s not necessarily the most likable hero.
The creatures assaulting his home every night–vampire, zombie…it almost doesn’t matter what they are so much as that they are, to him, inhuman, and therefore to be avoided in the nighttime and slain in the daytime–aren’t the true monster. The horror of I Am Legend is the horror of a man left alone with his own thoughts. As a piece of modern horror, I enjoyed it, but I had serious issues with the protagonist.
In fact, none of the many adaptations of this book are even remotely faithful to this piece, which is actually chilling in its subtlety. This week it’s Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which if you’ve only seen the Will Smith film is worth a read. I’m taking a course on monsters in horror fiction, and over the next few months will be blogging about responses to some classic and contemporary works.
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