Stuart Cloete and "The Blast"

“There was the girl who ran into Grand Central Station pursued by two men, whom I shot. It was as simple as that.  I was going out to get canned goods from the basement of a ruined store and had a rifle in my hand. I knew the girl by sight; she was a dancer in a nearby musical show. She smiled at me and said thank you as if I had opened a door for her. And I, regretting the expenditure of my own two shells, wondered if it had been worthwhile. The shots on my part, and the smile on the girl’s, were out of their context here.”

-Stuart Cloete, The Blast, pg.15

Cloete addresses this “context” in various points of the 1947 novella, The Blast, and I’m fairly certain his approach to discussing it marks morality as an object of utility. Morality here would stand for the reasoning behind utilizing bullets that could aid in self-preservation for the preservation of a stranger instead. Rather than indicating that morality is essential in all social interaction, Cloete suggests that it is society, the existence of a massive number of humans cohabitating in a country or community, which necessitates and validates moral action. Society provides context, a scenario in which certain behaviors are more appropriate than others for continued survival of the individual or individuals. This passage implies that personal survival in the absence of a social structure is of greater importance than group-survival. The narrator “regrets” using his bullets, and actually wonders if saving a young woman from two male aggressors was worth the “expenditure.” There is nothing to be gained on a social level for an action regarded as ‘good’ by the narrators’ pre-apocalypse society in a post-apocalyptic world, and when the girl smiles and “says thank you as if [he] had opened a door for her,” her response is an indication of a kind of pre-apocalypse echo. She is not relieved, not desperate, but carelessly grateful, as if he had not just saved her from rape and murder. Of course, it has to be considered that the narrator is unreliable. Perhaps if the girl had fallen over herself with gratitude, his character might have been presented as feeling that his actions were justified in preserving her life, but instead he is described as acting on reflex. Both he and the girl are enacting old behaviors rather than consciously creating new ones. There is no sense of rebuilding social structure here: He regrets saving her, and she is barely grateful to him. The morality that would have championed this behavior is gone, replaced by the pragmatism of the Cloete’s lone survivalist.  

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011
Journal #2