I Am Legend

This short novel by Richard Matheson is something I have read in passing before this course. I stopped at the part where the dog dies my first read and never will watch the movie again due to the death of the dog. It is sad how passionate I get about animal deaths. However, reading through in full, ironically the good stuff does not start until after the dog dies in the novel.


From the beginning, I found myself picking up and having to put the novel back down to avoid sleeping until Chapter 15. In my educated opinion, Matheson should do a deep edit on the content of the first fourteen chapters, or deep-six them entierly and build starting with Ruth's first appearance.  The novel is hugely repetitive and leaves the reader tired of reading the same thing over and over. The early chapters repeat the same, dead, cycle. Robert Neville is seemingly the only human being left. He is sexually tempted by female vampires and taunted his old friend nightly causing him to get drunk to avoid them both. By morning he goes out and stakes sleeping, ironically helpless, vampires. This is the dead cycle the reader has to keep reading, again and again, chapter after chapter before the meat of the plot starts. I understand background information is a need; however, this cycle could have easily been covered via flashback or dialogue to keep the reader interested. It was tough to struggle through the first fourteen chapters because of the repetition.

A midway sidenote: I also felt as a reader I was being told I would not understand the simple process of human comfort and repetition. This is due to the over repeating of the same situations. As a reader, it is one thing for the writer to slip in information about something that is not commonly known. However, it is a problem to make your reader feel you think they are stupid or inadequate in understanding without being given a chance.


With the ending of the novel, I feel a first-person, unreliable narration would have made this novel shine much more. I kept hoping for Poe's style to spice up the horror in this work. Robert Neville is a complex character that falls out of the spotlight due to the narration. The element of terror would have been much more convincing if we got to experience it from entierly his view and mind rather than this ghost above him. He was also relatively contradicting as a character. However, the reader can notice this as the growth and development of him as the plot progresses instead of an entire downfall. For the first two parts, he is trying to avoid the sexual temptation of the vampires and longing for a physical relationship. When Ruth comes along, seemingly human, and his first chance to have a physical connection, his mindset was entirely different. He became obsessed with the fact that she was alive, and he was no longer alone. There is one point where he acknowledges his old self longing for sex, but at this point in the story, his mindset of sex became meaningless since he lived without it for so long. This is another very confusing idea to grasp because even without something for so long, your mind does not forget the sensation it gives you. If the novel started with Ruth, and there was room to develop that relationship, it would have helped his development as a character much more. Sure, sex really is not the best thing since sliced bread, but the progression of him with a sexual predator mental state to a state of abstinence did not convert well with the small scene. Another point on him, Robert was distrusting and hurt by his distrust. Watching him as a character, it hurt to watch him fail to understand the reason for his suspicion. It made me feel his thought process was no different than the creatures he killed. He has lived alone, in the same cycle, for three years. I think his internal struggle of trust failed him as a character because it was not capitalized upon well. An internal battle that would have been more interesting to follow the development would have been him being worried that he is infected.


Let's talk about the monsters. There are three different groups of monsters in this novel. There are the vampires, Ruth's hybrid living kind, and the old race, Robert's type (assuming he is the last). The vampires, the ones that would gather around Robert's home, failed to impress me. They came off as zombie-vampire hybrids due to their living and dead opposite aspects Neville spoke about often. They also contradicted themselves. Some nights they seem to be intelligent beings and cunning in their efforts to convince him to come out. Other nights they are, forgive the short term, idiots. When I imagine a vampire, I think intelligent, cunning, and fast. The vampires in this work are sluggish idiots in their nightly life. They jump off lamp posts trying to fly, they lack the ability to or do not do anything worthwhile to Robert or his house, and they are in daytime comas which allow Neville to kill them. If they were housed and sleeping, it seems unlikely a traditional vampire would allow 'death' to come so quickly upon themselves. Matheson could have been aiming to create a new version, which he did in his respect, as most monsters evolve or receive unique qualities over time. I feel with the contradiction of them being intelligent and able to senseless creatures failed his monsters hard here. I also struggled with the idea of them being living dead and living. As previously noted, they came off as these zombie-vampire hybrids, and that fell flat. Matheson would have had more success with picking one. Ruth's kind were interesting, and I wish they were developed more on a dissection basis. Neville went so into detail about the plague, bacteria, and blood, and it was glorious. I feel the novel should have started with Ruth and progressed from there with a series of flashbacks as needed to suit the background information. Finally, there is not much to be said about Robert's old race. They are merely humans killing to survive, but they deserved some recognition as monsters in a sense since they were now the outcasts.