Analysis of The story “The Curator.”
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Analysis of The story “The Curator.”
In the story “The Curator” by Brian Evenson, a monstrous human-made poisonous cloud sweeps everything in its way. It ravages through the world, making everything the air and water toxic as well. The human race gets wiped out, and one woman remains. She was part of a team of an archivist who collected data on everything about the human race. She is left to handle all this data which included strands of human DNA that were to be used by whoever might find it to be aware of the human race, know of their existence, and instruct on how to revive it. She is left to decide whether to leave the information on the human race for the benefit of the human race. The rest of the team travels outside earth to find a new habitat to start over again. She begins to think of how the human race destroyed the planet themselves and how they were the architects of their extinction. She eliminates part of the information by getting rid of some of the DNA strands. She was now not an archivist but rather a curator. She decides what is to be preserved and what is not to be kept and destroys what she deemed not fit for display. The Curator eliminates all the research that involved painstaking work to gather. She decides the fate of humanity and determines they should not exist again to destroy it again.
The evil and destructive nature of humanity is depicted. The creation of the cloud is one clear indicator of man’s evil spirit (1). Why would man create such a wrong thing that would one day mean his extinction from the face of the earth? The thought of the protagonist that humans should not come back (4) is another crucial display of humans’ destructive nature. The actions by the protagonist also prove that humans tend to be evil at times. She is left to protect human history, but she thinks and does otherwise. She prevents the prospects of ever springing humanity back to life.
Human self-belief is another theme presented through the story. The protagonist believes that she is doing an act of justice by determining the fate of humanity. She thinks she is justified in not doing her due diligence as she was instructed to. The image she decides to live behind is only the evil side of humanity. She disregards all the good man has done and chooses only the dark side to be known in the future. The protagonists assume that humanity is a curse and seem convinced that she was morally right to destroy all good that humanity had made and only decides to live what she believed would be punished. There is nothing good or morally right in her actions. She avoids committing to her obligations, chooses to feed her inner self-perception, and decides to leave only the lousy forgetting that she was also part of humanity. Through this action, she was also proving evil. This should serve as a lesson that sins do not make a right.
Betrayal is portrayed in the story as well. The protagonist chose to betray her colleagues and paints them as the perpetrators. She claims that humans destroyed their world and then traveled to the moon to find a new place to eliminate. In contrast, these were not the team’s intentions when they went out of space. They had gone to look for a new home that they could set up and start human life again. She backstabs her teammates by blaming them for what they did not do and paints a false image of their mission outside earth.
The story “Curator” can be applied in the present world. It is a reflection of some of the world’s evil doings. The existence of nuclear weapons, which seems to be a competition between countries, represents the poisonous cloud used in the story. How the cloud ravaged the world is the same as the COVID 19 virus wiping humanity. The fact that both the virus and the cloud were all artificial proves that humans are their own biggest enemy. We can use the story to establish that we are responsible for our fate. If humans became extinct, then it would be of our own doing.
