The second type, however, are markedly different from the type of undead that are traditionally presented in the zombie novel. First, there are the skels and these are the ones who meet the traditional definition of a zombie- hungry for human flesh and very mobile. The book Zone One presents the reader with two types of zombies. Two types of zombie, unlike the traditional definition of a zombie, were introduced by Whitehead and they are for realizing the lack of distinction between life and death with the stragglers, and shows that the stragglers themselves show how people are in-between of life and death even though they seem to be dead. Through the novel Zone One, Whitehead uses stragglers to show that life and death are not binary, and is it possible to occupy a space between to the two.

Even though death could be considered as a final and negative, Whitehead’s characters “the stragglers” hint that there may be a way to survive in the apocalyptic world with hope, and suggest that there is always a reason to keep going, even in a space between life and death. The novel represents life in a way that being alive and dead are the same, not different. Whitehead questions what it means to be dead because there are always exceptions, such as the living dead (zombies), and illustrates that there are no real definitive set of standards to say whether one is dead or alive. This is also consistent with the novel Zone One by Colson Whitehead, which is about the skels, stragglers which are the living dead, and survivors like Mark Spitz in the apocalyptic world of New York city by plague, and their lives in there, specifically Zone one, which is a small area in Manhattan, with the living. The idea of the Abject is a state of being in-between subject and object which mirrors the state of being between being alive and dead every time.

Zone one colson whitehead sparknotes