Abstract

In the paper, I deal with three novels that focus on the theme of being the last person on earth in relationship to the animal or beast that now dominates the world of nature. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road all explore the transition from the dominance of humans to that of the beast. Shelley’s The Last Man places emphasis on the fall of the human race by a plague and the emergence of the animal as taken over the space of mankind. In Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, the character Toby must deal with a dangerous new kind of animal that has been brought into existence by human experimentation. Finally, although the animal is absent in McCarthy’s The Road, large segments of the human race engage in cannibalistic activity, thus losing their humanity. Jacques Derrida’s examination of the animal and its relationship with humans in The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II is crucial to the paper, and looks at what mankind has traditionally denied the animal. These include access to language, values, and finally ethical concerns such as Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the face. With the beast now being the dominant species, it becomes imperative for the last person to make sense of his or her humanity in the context of a new dichotomy that favors the primacy of the animal or the beast over that of the human. The paper, therefore, explores the last person’s relationship with the beasts through ideas relating to language, values, and finally Levinas’s idea of the face, and examines the efforts of the last person on earth to maintain his or her own humanity in the absence of all other humans.