The old world has come to an end: more than half of the people of Earth are blind, the planet is in captivity of carnivorous walking plants, resources are being depleted and infections are multiplying. It is time to build a new life among the ruins of civilization. Is there any chance for survivors to have a future? The post-apocalyptic story unfolds in London on the day, when almost all living creatures are blind, and the survivors begin to fight for their further existence. The threat also comes from carnivorous plants – triffids that can move. They also have deadly stingers in their arsenal.
The Day of the Triffids is a very high-quality example of social fiction. It is filled with different discussions about the meaning of life, about the prospects for survival, about price of living, about the possibilities of saving humanity overall after such a global “sweep”, and of course about the entire social and psychological consequences. The author manages to catch and to place before the reader the right questions.
John Wyndham is a man who combined fantastic plots and themes about life and death in his book. That is why the question “what does it mean to be a human?” is discussed here. In this world, in which only a hundred of sighted people left among the millions of blind people, the issue of humanity is very serious. People should know how to act, who to save, what to do now and when the world is on the verge of extinction. These questions appear not only to sighted people. Blind people should choose to live or to die, to fight or to let others do it for the sake of them. How to live now, when everything that people are accustomed to, collapsed?
It is believed that Wyndham’s novel is about ecology. The fact that people are so accustomed to mock at nature, nature will be standing against humanity. However, the triffids, as the punishment of nature, are in the background. The issues of humanity and love are in the forefront. Love has the main role in the novel. Love leads the characters, does not allow them to break down and helps to survive. It helps to build something new on fragments of a dying past.
The Day of the Triffids is more about feelings, about emotions. The author describes in a very interesting way the changes, taking place in the world, the transformation of people into a herd of animals, blindly fighting for their existence. The whole novel is saturated with the spirit of death, pain and despair. However, in the center of the story the main character, Bill, who knows that everything is over, does not lose hope for a bright future.
The book makes the reader think at least a little about how it is amazing to see, hear, walk and feel. It is amazing, when people have water, heat, food, home and peace. It will be terrible to lose everything one day. What a shaky human civilization this is, since one change can destroy it.
