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1-Page Summary of Station Eleven

Overall Summary

The novel Station Eleven opens with a play of King Lear in Toronto. Arthur Leander, an aging Hollywood actor, is playing the lead role and is minutes away from death due to a heart attack. Kirsten Raymonde, who plays one of Lear’s daughters onstage, witnesses Arthur’s death as she watches him die from stage left. A former paparazzo named Jeevan Chaudhary leaps on stage to perform CPR on Arthur after he suffers a massive heart attack. As medics take over for Jeevan, Kirsten comforts him by saying that she knows that Arthur has died because his eyes were open but unseeing when he passed away. The cast and crew of the play decide to contact someone close to Arthur so they can let them know about his passing since his son Tyler lives in Israel with Elizabeth Colton (Arthur’s ex-wife). They decide not to tell Tyler about what happened; instead they will ask someone else—the narrator states that everyone still left in the theater would die within three weeks.

Meanwhile, Jeevan (Arthur’s son) receives a phone call from his friend Hua who tells him about the impending spread of Georgia Flu all over the world. There was also another flu that killed Arthur while he was in Malaysia. He quickly went to board up with his paraplegic brother Frank before the flu spreads further and kills more people.

The book then jumps ahead twenty years after the outbreak of a deadly disease, and focuses on the Traveling Symphony, which is made up of musicians and actors. Kirsten has joined this group of people, who travel around in the Great Lakes area performing Shakespearean plays. Kirsten often breaks into houses to find comics that her friend Arthur gave her before he died.

The Symphony arrives in a town called St. Deborah by the Water, but they can’t find two of their members who stayed behind when the last time the group passed through because they were having a child. The town is now ruled by an authoritarian figure known as “The Prophet.” Therefore, instead of getting involved with this drama, the group leaves immediately after performing for his followers. Kirsten reflects on her tabloids that detail Arthur’s life and what he has been up to since he left home years ago.

The novel then transitions back to a time before the Flu, pivoting on one of the photos of Arthur that Kirsten has collected. Arthur and Miranda meet and fall in love, but soon after they marry, Miranda’s boyfriend hits her and she leaves him. She meets Arthur again at a party in Hollywood where he is cheating with his co-star Elizabeth Colton. After this realization, Miranda meets Jeevan who tricks her into an unflattering photograph.

In a series of excerpts from an interview, Kirsten talks about her parents’ deaths and how she walked for the first year with her brother until he died. She then found the Symphony in Year Twenty, after leaving St. Deborah by the Water and fleeing the Prophet. The Symphony realizes that Eleanor has stowed away to avoid becoming another one of his wives but decides to keep moving towards their destination: The Museum of Civilization.

During their journey, members of the Symphony begin to disappear. They are unable to locate them and soon the Clarinet is gone as well. The group decides that they should follow protocol and try to meet up at the Museum of Civilization where everyone else will be able to meet them. Soon after moving on, Kirsten and August discover a golf course with some useful supplies in it. However, when they come out they have lost sight of the rest of the Symphony and must now travel alone. They then find an untouched house filled with more useful items such as new costumes for themselves which make it easier for them to move around unnoticed by people who might want to hurt or capture them again.