Zone One Lesson Plan

“Barricades collapsed with haste, once exposed for the riddled and rotten things they had always been.”

Literally, this sentence is referring to the walls of the settlement camp collapsing. Figuratively, what is this sentence referring to?

Throughout the novel, Whitehead alludes to the fact that the new, developing society is not so unlike the society that came before. The old systems of greed, corruption, and inequality were already in place (see: Buffalo versus everyone else). People were already living a zombie-like existence, leading their lives in a sort of mindless manner, not so unlike the stragglers. The barricades collapsing are not just the literal walls of...