What can an individual do when facing almost certain death at the hands of a faceless, barbaric and machine like organization, hell bent on the destruction of humanity? In the novella I am Legend, written by Richard Matheson and published in 1954, Robert Neville has taken the challenge of defending the last bastions of his lost society in an apocalyptic world filled with hordes of vampires attempting to capture and consume his blood. As Neville watches the decay of his old society he has time to contemplate his role in the new society, whether it involves struggling to survive day to day or by saving the human race. Neville begins to question whether there is any difference between his old society and the new growing society filled with these biological monsters, vampires. Matheson re-mastered the old vampire legends into a new compelling story all while bringing up important questions on the roles of conformity and individualism in the world. Society was built on conformity, and Robert Neville in I am Legend shows what happens when an individual is in the way of a society’s progress. Conformity is a very strong tool in the hands of any political body as they can create the feeling of fear and hate towards an idea, group or individual. A political system which uses conformity to its advantage is communism. Communism attempts to create equality among the masses. The idea of communism was a very controversial ideology that caused many fears among democratic countries seen as a cancer in the world. “But is he worse than the parent who gave society a neurotic child who became a politician... This unkind prejudice, this thoughtless bias? Why cannot the vampires live where he chooses?”(Matheson pg 20-21). This is an allegory for the atmosphere of the 1950’s, which includes McCarthyism. The phrase “neurotic child who became a politician”, refers to US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s who is famous for accusing citizens of being communist or communist sympathizers. Neville, who is shown as an individual, and the vampires, who are almost shown as all sharing the same collective mind, are just an allegory of the idea of communism in the USA, at the time, as the vampires are the daunting conformist group and they are the individual attempting to defend their freedom. Every movement wants to indoctrinate and paint man’s existence with the same paintbrush. Communism is this un-killable entity that has the need to consume. “Certain kinds of Bacilli, when conditions became unfavorable for life, were capable of creating, from themselves, bodies called spore… This body, when completed, detached itself from the bacillus and became a free spore, highly resistant to physical and chemical change.” Vampirism, which is a symbol for communism, is an illness that creates a thirst for blood. Blood sustains the body of the vampire much like how power sustains the political body of communism. Matheson presents the germ as an incurable and highly infectious disease that creates a collective, barbaric group that will stop at nothing until every living thing is either dead or infected. The conformed society actively seeks out the destruction of any group/individual whose goals, principles and lifestyles differ from their own. “We are the infected. But you already know that. What you don’t understand yet is that we’re going to stay alive. We’ve found a way to do away with all those wretched creature whom death has cheated. And, even though I pray otherwise, we may decide to kill you and those like you.” (Matheson pg 143) The living vampires are putting down anybody who is biologically different because they see their race as being biologically superior to the dead vampires and Neville. It is a subtle allegory of the communist government in the Soviet Union who actively sought out any person who disagreed with their ideology and deemed them biologically dangerous, deviant, mad or sick and were removed from society. I am Legend offers a similar model as Neville
