Station Eleven Summary and Analysis

Section Three Summary I Prefer You with a Crown

The story moves back in time, when Arthur met his first wife Miranda. They’re from the same tiny island and meet in Toronto, where Miranda is a newly arrived teenager and Arthur is an increasingly successful actor. As Arthur’s acting career flourishes, Miranda is a receptionist at a shipping company, spending her spare time on her Dr. Eleven comic. They connect, partly based on shared history, partly due to their tremendous differences: Arthur cares about success and how others perceive his art, while Miranda creates her comic for her own private enjoyment.

Years later, Miranda and Arthur are married and living in Hollywood. At a dinner party with Elizabeth (Arthur’s costar), Clark (Arthur’s oldest friend), and Arthur’s lawyer, Miranda understands that Arthur and Elizabeth are having an affair. Her marriage is over. Outside, she encounters paparazzi and talks to a photographer named Jeevan, who betrays her trust by snapping an unflattering photo. Later, Elizabeth apologizes, saying she believes everything happens for a reason. Miranda takes a paperweight Clark has given to Arthur. They divorce, and she moves back to Toronto, resuming her job and working on Dr. Eleven. The story picks up the year before the Georgia flu, with Clark and Arthur. Arthur has just divorced for the third time, and Elizabeth has taken their son to Jerusalem.

The section also includes interviews between Kirsten and the “Librarian” of a town the Symphony passes through in Year Fifteen after the Georgia flu. He is collecting an oral history of the post-collapse world. She talks about her life before the Symphony, how she walked with her brother until he died, but she remembers almost nothing. They discuss the towns she travels through, how some have become cults while others erase the past completely. She admits that the tattoo of the two knives indicates that she has had to kill two people.

Section Three Analysis I Prefer You with a Crown

This section provides much of the context for Arthur’s life, and, consequently, how his life impacts the rest of the plot. The promise of his and Miranda’s beginning is already soured for readers by the knowledge that by the time he dies, he has been married and divorced three times. Further, the disappointment Clark feels with his aging friend toward the end is a counterweight to Arthur’s success earlier on. In contrast, scenes of Jeevan as a paparazzo highlight how much he has changed and improved in his desire to help people instead of taking advantage of them.

Miranda is uncomfortable with the Hollywood lifestyle; for her, art is private, not a tool for status. Questions of what defines art and what is truly valuable in a civilization are viewed through the prism of Arthur and Miranda’s perspectives. This section introduces the origin of the glass paperweight that winds up in Kirsten’s belongings. This item, which is totally useless to her survival, remains with her because she finds it beautiful, which is why Miranda took it in the first place. Like Dr. Eleven, it is a piece of art that exists solely to bring personal joy, not fame, and like Dr. Eleven, it ends up traveling far beyond its original trajectory.

The novel’s plot structure grows more complex during this section, as disparate threads start to intersect. Multiple timelines reveal important backstories that begin to explain the connections among different characters. Even inanimate objects, like the paperweight and the Dr. Eleven comics, appear both before and after the collapse, helping to intertwine characters’ fates together.