Station Eleven is a book that revolves around the importance of art and the extent to which making art, preserving art, and taking sustenance from art is a central part of the human experience. The book's title itself is a reference to the fictional Dr. Eleven series of comic books, drawn by Arthur Leander's first wife, Miranda Carroll. These comic books, a labor of love to which Miranda dedicated years of her life and into which she poured her own hopes, dreams, and despairs, survive the end of the world and become for Tyler a new Bible and for Kirsten a source of hope and strength. In the final scene of the novel, Clark looks out at the world and thinks of Miranda's Dr. Eleven drawings, wondering whether society is even now rebuilding itself. Miranda's art, and the hope it contains, touched barely anyone in the world before the collapse, but in the world after the pandemic, it plays a central role in the lives of multiple people, especially once it is enshrined in Clark's museum.

Miranda's comic books are far from the only evidence of art's survival in the post-pandemic world. Shakespeare is a point of reference throughout the story: Miranda herself has a name from the Shakespearean canon, while in the very first scene of the novel, Arthur Leander dies onstage in the middle of a performance of King Lear. The members of the Traveling Symphony, meanwhile, move from one town to another performing Shakespearean plays, as well as symphonies. They take inspiration from the fact that many of Shakespeare's plays emerged from a time of plague that frequently closed his theaters. Just as people survived that, so, too, will they survive this. But so-called "lowbrow" art, like comic books and television, are not disregarded as important in this new world. On the first of the Symphony's caravans is daubed a quotation from Star Trek: "Survival is insufficient." This is the motto by which the Symphony lives. It is possible to survive without art, but it is not possible to truly live.

On a very basic level, Station Eleven is a book about life and death. It begins with the death of Arthur Leander, a man who, because he was famous, was honored in a newspaper obituary after his death onstage. There are many ironies, however, tied up in Arthur's demise. It is notable that there were very few people personally close to Arthur toward the end of his life; his producer was unsure who should be notified, and Arthur feared that his life had been inconsequential. Yet despite this—and despite the fact that his death by heart attack presaged billions of other deaths from the Georgia Flu—Arthur's death has a ripple effect upon numerous people. His death affects and connects Kirsten, a child actress who knew him and who spends years trying to find traces of him; Elizabeth, Tyler, and Clark, who travel on the same plane to reach his funeral and are diverted together to Severn City Airport; and Jeevan, who tried to perform CPR on Arthur and whose name none of the others know. Arthur's death was considered important in the old world because he was famous, but it becomes much more important in the post-pandemic world, in many unexpected ways.

Why, Mandel seems to ask, are some deaths momentous while others are statistics? The death of Frank, Jeevan's disabled brother, is barely mentioned, but years later he is remembered in the name of Jeevan's son. Frank dies so that Jeevan can survive, and his brother honors him for that. This seems to offer a...