The Scarlet Plague

Content Warning: This section discusses a pandemic, murder, and domestic violence. The source text includes ableist and racist language, which this guide reproduces only in quotations. 

Smith, called “Granser” by the children, is the novella’s protagonist—a weather-beaten, rather frail 87-year-old man who currently lives as a hunter-gatherer but once worked as a college English professor. Throughout the book, Smith is defined by a wistful nostalgia for life before the plague, often recalling the abundance of food and the cultured life he enjoyed 60 years previously. The grandsons cannot conceive of what Smith is talking about and dismiss him as an old fool; Smith in turn takes every opportunity to deplore the children as crude “barbarians” and “savages.” Smith’s status as the only remaining person who remembers life before the plague has tended to isolate him, and the lack of understanding between the two generations provides much of the book’s tension and conflict. Indeed, Smith himself is a divided person, with one foot in the “civilized” past and another in the “barbaric” present, and yet just as the novella critiques the cruelties and hypocrisies of purported civilization, it implies that Smith—as a member of the one-time elite—remembers that civilization in unduly positive terms.