Intertwining Plague and Memory: Post-Apocalyptic Genre and Possible World Narrative in Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M

1 Unrevealed Catastrophe of Memory Loss in The Book of M

Narratives of unrevealed catastrophes usually influence the creation of the narrative structure. M consists of four narratives, and each narrative is interlinked with the other three parts to show the whole world that is full of Forgetting, which arrives in Arlington overnight. Simultaneously, this kind of plague “happened at a different speed for each person, but by any measure” (Shepherd 2018, 14). In addition, “the shadows had disappeared in India, Brazil, and Panama, but before it had gone much further” (Shepherd 2018, 55). The narrator retrospects that the plague is highly infectious, and it is easily transmissible among human beings. Nevertheless, Ory is unaware of the upcoming catastrophe until considerable damage has finished. At this point, Peng Shepherd seeks to express a certain sense of uncertainty about the unknown disaster and trigger the readers’ reflection on the relation between the plague in reality and the Forgetting in the story. Since David Herman put forward that “narrative is a cognitive and communicative strategy for navigating the gap, in everyday experience, between what expects and what takes place” (2004], p. 97), the desperate setting enables readers to anticipate and infer the extreme circumstances of the characters. Alternatively, Brooks (1984, 94) observes that “we read [present moments, in literature and in life] in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot”. Thus, the setting of the novel allows readers to witness the attempt to imagine the unrealized power of the Forgetting and the world in illness.

Except for the setting, characters in M are deeply concerned about their states of life even though all of them cannot conceive how chaotic the world would turn out to be. As the stories unfold, most people in the city choose to flee southern cities such as Orlando and Louisiana in the U.S. after the news of the Forgetting spread out in the whole town. Ory evaluates this in “They were crazy to leave Arlington” (Shepherd 2018, 36) and comes out with such a thought that “Maybe society has been nice before, but he was not sure it would be great again. Maybe after everything was settled there in New Orleans, after they’d figured out some way to control the place. Maybe years from now, he’d consider it” (Shepherd 2018, 37). In the following days, Ory is lucky enough to avoid contacting the Forgetting as he prepares to find food for his wife. Nevertheless, he is also unaware of the impending ruin until it does considerable harm. Even if he fails to realize how the world would turn out to be, the repetition of the word “maybe” not merely expresses Ory’s overoptimistic attitude toward the forthcoming ruin but also conveys the great concern of the changes to their lives. Ory recognizes the virus’s impact since it gradually turns out to be a divide between his preceding and subsequent livelihood. When Ory returns to home and brings food to his infected wife, he surprisingly finds that “She was gone” (Shepherd 2018, 41). After this, Max also illustrates for her departure that “you still have your shadow – you cannot understand. No note I could leave could ever convince you not to look for me – convince you that I left because I had to. I had to. To save you. So I left nothing. Just disappeared” (Shepherd 2018, 67). In this regard, Ory and Max’s parts prove the virus’s unpredictability and unconventionality and reveal the unrevealed catastrophe in society.

Beyond that, M provides warnings of the Forgetting potential outcomes if such situations further develop. After rendering the apocalypse in Ory and Max’s part, the narratives jump ahead to another character named Hemu Joshi, who is “the first person to lose shadow” (Shepherd 2018, 49) in the world. After Joshi’s condition happens, the local news reports that some other Indians come to lose their shadows likewise. One day, Joshi becomes disoriented in Pune’s business district, and his families soon arrive there and find him, but Hemu does not recognize them at all. As the plague spreads across the world, all infected people are “suffering various degrees of amnesia, with no discernible pattern across age, sex, education, or geography” (Shepherd 2018, 64). Unfortunately, it finally reaches Boston, in which Naz lives due to its high transmissibility. Meanwhile, the entire U.S. market completely collapsed, and people began to compete for food. Under such circumstances, a character named Naz cannot endure hunger, so she decides to commit suicide since it is a “more dignified death than starvation” (Shepherd 2018, 107) but is eventually stopped by her sister Rojan in time. As a reliable narrator, Rojan says that their homeland Iran also has a case, and “it was everywhere now” (Shepherd 2018, 109). In such a suffocating atmosphere, Forgetting’s high transmissibility makes Naz rethink how to survive starvation and loss of memory. Since memory is “imaginative reconstruction of the past in response to current needs” (Neumann 2008, 334), Forgetting becomes a tool for making Naz’s previous experience usable for the present condition. Then, Naz and Rojan chose to move to New York “because that was the only place that Rojan thought she hadn’t come up on news” (Shepherd 2018, p. 111). On their way, Naz has killed six people because they “were starving for something else” and but “Naz didn’t want to kill them since she was afraid of killing them” (Shepherd 2018, 165). There also remain details about her killing the other person who intends to steal their food, such as “The shadowless didn’t seem to recognize the arrow as Naz pulled it quickly to the string and drew it back, and did not dodge. He just kept running straight down the aisle, straight for her. That was good. It made it so she could aim an instantaneous, painless end. Her fifth of the six kills” (Shepherd 2018, 170). Since Naz is an archer, the bow and arrow once made her the Olympic champion but now turn out to be the murder weapon. After that, “she’d lost count of how many she’d killed” (Shepherd 2018, 202). Naz’s extreme choice of killing here motivates readers to reflect on humanity’s fundamental problems. Why does society’s fight against Forgetting turn out to be competing intensely for food? As there always remain events such as starvation, conflicts, and dangers in M, Naz’s changing identity from Olympic champion to a murderer highlights amnesia’s possible risk as an epidemic to the body and mind. In this way, it highlights the importance of memory and Naz’s desire to remember and survive. Readers may prompt themselves to imagine the challenging living condition of narrating Naz and experiencing Naz and connect the precollapse world and the narrator’s contemporary anxieties over human identity. In this sense, Forgetting not only represents Naz and Rojan’s embarrassment when confronted with starvation and death but also symbolizes the dangerous moments of social disorder and break-down without outside support. Arguably, the plight of Naz and Rojan can be considered postapocalyptic scenarios, which is inevitable for readers to conceive.

In the end, all narrative strands reunite and interlink to Ory’s story, which fosters the connections between the pre-collapse world and later catastrophe. His decision to search for his wife at the beginning gradually evolves into the main storyline. Simultaneously, his exploration of a set of events in the past and future was more or less connected with the amnesiac, a nameless protagonist that almost forgets everything. As mentioned before, Hemu Joshi also infects by the Forgetting, and he has to quarantine him separately, so the amnesiac has sent to help Hemu Joshi and find out the secret of Forgetting. Instead of focusing on the mystery of elephants’ sharing collective memories in India, the narrator attaches importance to the break-down of civilization after the onset of the epidemic: “the Forgetting touched Boston, suddenly and thoroughly. Time before the accident had frozen forever, but time after it suddenly sped up” (Shepherd 2018, 218). In addition, “the amnesiac tried to imagine all the fantastical iterations a hurricane could evolve into, all the twisted interpretations of the human desire to stop a deadly storm that there were, both possible and impossible” (Shepherd 2018, 358). Following his perspective, it can be inferred that the moments after the outbreak of Forgetting are narratively associated with the pre-collapse fictional world. Pavel (1986, 90) proposes that “fictional worlds do not merely include the sum of new states of affairs but also the general quality of the alternate world”. The world described by the amnesiac is not an individual fragment of the whole story; instead, it deals with many problems with the crisis definition. Survivors such as Ory and Naz can only speculate on what might bring them to this point, and readers are keen on getting their own believability to their reception of the text. Given such a situation, it is worth assuming that all the figures are necessarily correlated, and the vivid depictions of Forgetting “do not typically revise or restore what has come before the catastrophe, but attempt to figure what remains after and emerges from it” (Doyle 2015, 105). Doyle’s words illustrate that all characters’ continuous contact with the Forgetting is not so much action for survival as a valuable opportunity for “examining and enacting the dangerous possibilities for human and nonhuman life beyond the artifice of revelation” (Doyle 2015, 103).

2 Postapocalyptic Genre of The Book of M

Postapocalyptic fiction usually features certain characteristics, such as human life after a catastrophe, reconstruction of society, and destabilized history. Among them, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007), Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) are the representative works of this genre. Curtis (2010, 19), in her Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (2010), illustrates that those fictions “well illustrate how that framework shapes our thinking about the social contract”. Indeed, the most persuasive power of the postapocalyptic fiction lies not in the collapsed world itself but in the interactions of those survivors living together. In particular, postapocalyptic texts vividly depict personal relationships such as love, friendship, and nostalgia. In doing so, these relationships illustrate characters’ intentions of moving from home to another city or country and awaken “the sense of possibility for how we might live together” (Curtis 2015, 5). This part concentrates on the relationship between M and its postapocalyptic genre to explore the positive effects of community life in the postapocalyptic literature.

In general, scholars and researchers tend to employ eschatology and critiques of late capitalism to interpret postapocalyptic fiction. The word “eschatology” is rooted in the Bible, and the original meaning implies “disclose” or “recover.” As Žižek (2010, 117) points out, “Christian apocalyptic tradition rejects the wisdom according to which some kind of hierarchical order is our fate”. It often presents a prediction of the newly emerged world, which provides an understanding of the apocalypse as a “means to unveil or to reveal and revelations of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm are intertwined with time and utopia” (De Cristofaro 2018, 3). The latter refers to “explorations of the postapocalyptic imagination are properly explorations of various break-downs of capitalism itself” (Doyle 2015, 101). Some critics have highlighted the link between them and formed postapocalyptic fiction as the ending of capitalist society itself. For instance, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Derrida, all locate the postapocalyptic transformations of human thought and experience “in developments of technology and global capitalism” (Berger 2000, 392). To explore the nature of the postapocalyptic world and the genre of M, it is also inevitable to put the catastrophes of memory loss in the context of capitalism’s social and historical consequences in America.

Even if scholars prefer to understand postapocalyptic fiction from the perspective of critique of capitalism, it is not appropriate to frame M as an anti-capitalist narrative fiction because M’s core does not lie in the narratives of “end of the world” but instead in the relationships between an individual’s life and community living. In the story, both Max’s desire to live and Ory’s longing for love represent the author’s yearning for a living in hope and harmony in modern society. According to M’s author Shepherd, she also evaluates the novel as “the most romantic story in the world: wife loses her memory and disappears, husband traverses the country, braving wilderness and war to find her, against million-to-one odds” (Shepherd 2018, 552), so the postapocalyptic world in Shepherd’s sense is not quite an end but instead the greatness of the human’s emotional interaction. In this respect, the novel’s whole theme somehow foregrounds the positive effects of civilization’s break-down. For instance, there exists no efficient transportation, well-developed infrastructure, and government with authority and credibility in the text. Television and the Internet serve as the only source of information sharing among humans, but they finally “went down” (Shepherd 2018, 61). This novel values more the characters’ alternative living states after the collapse of civilization than addressing a list of problems that the capitalist system itself poses to ecological, environmental, human rights, and other issues. In other words, M does not focus on the problems of the development of capitalism in America but rather on a unique and irresistible version of the apocalypse: what happens when the human shadow disappears? Why are memories tied to shadows? Why can shadowless people gather together and remake the world in the way they misremember it? The last question seems to be the author’s most concern: how to survive together in the post-eschatological world. Shepherd insightfully employs Forgetting in her work to observe humankind’s cohesion in such a reawakening world.

In comparison with other postapocalyptic fictions, M is not entirely concerned with the chaos immediately following the apocalypse but rather foregrounds the process of reconstruction of the human community. In the story, in Ory and Max’s desolate house in Arlington, Hemu Joshi’s Zero Shadow Festival in Pune, and Naz’s training center in Boston, the narrators all refuse to introduce the background knowledge of such plague. Instead, the narrator focuses more on their destination, New York, as the last city of hope that all characters expect to live in due to the highest level of security safely. When Ory first arrived in the city, he desperately found that “what remained was a city that had been lit on fire to the last crevice and then doused with winter death” (Shepherd 2018, 175). The text here provides an apocalyptic scene in the human’s trapped situation, and the narrator avoids detailed depictions of the setting’s violent behaviors. Instead, the subject matter of Ory’s part is those characters’ assistance to others in the possible sheltered environment. Arguably, interpersonal relationships and cooperation among the protagonists promote the establishment of the postapocalyptic world. In the chapters named The One Who Gathers, the amnesiac keeps following Dr. Avanthikar’s advice and cooperates with her to research and develop a new vaccine in Washington. It was reported that Hemu Joshi died after injecting the experimental drug before. At this time, the amnesiac volunteers as the second experimenter under tremendous pressure in sentences such as “He tried to nod. His skin prickled as it waited for a needle” (Shepherd 2018, 425). After waking up, the amnesia firmly announces that “I know how we can stop the hurricane” (Shepherd 2018, 446), bringing plenty of hope to the rest of the community. According to Dr. Avanthikar, the amnesiac not only means a loss of memory but also represents a loss of imagination. As the helper of Dr. Avanthikar, he volunteered to be an experimental product for research on Forgetting. Eventually, he receives the people’s recognition and becomes a leader who helps others prevent the virus’s spread. Meanwhile, Ory and Naz also appraise him as “The One Who Gathers,” namely, the faith in survival that brings hope to the whole world. Several storylines are thus interconnected, proving that human cooperation is the most effective way to control unresolvable forgetting. Therefore, it is unsuitable to adopt the theory of eschatology or late capitalism as the tool to interpret the theme. Instead, the whole novel features humanity, optimism, and nostalgia. This proves that the community’s role should put more emphasis on the postapocalyptic world. In this respect, M concerns human beings’ collective life in the aftermath of the plague, allowing the reader to consider how to enact the plague and live in community life.

Postapocalyptic fiction usually captures readers’ fears and illustrates the necessity of community. Against such a backdrop, this type of fiction may invite us to ponder how we can judge the truth and values and “adopt a new ontological perspective” (Bell and Ryan 2019, 9). Rather than concentrating on unresolved conflicts, M demonstrates that our memory lies in what makes humans turn humans. Shepherd deliberately uses the letter M in the fiction title instead of memory since she is much aware of the essence and nature of the memory and poses questions about the relationship between the individual and the community. She argues that memory is the link between the individual and the community in the face of apocalyptic events and discusses her purpose of writing M during an interview:

I wanted to preserve that feeling of – nobody has any idea what to do, because we aren’t prepared for this and we didn’t see it coming. My research was actually a lot more personal. In the book, not everybody makes the right decision. I thought that would be how it would be in the real world, if this actually did happen to us. Some people would know a little bit more about what to do. Some people would think they did, and they really didn’t. I thought it would feel more real if the characters were able to make those same kind of mistakes (Nicolaou 2020).

Shepherd reminds us that M is not limited to providing a reactionary response to the twenty-first-century human survival conditions under the threat of the plague. Instead, it analyzes the status of the epidemic and the relevant issues that emerge from that state: why do we fear plague, what do we desire, how our community helps us to control the plague. Ory, Naz, and the amnesiac’s narratives are all postapocalyptic accounts that are intertwined with a unified utopian theme of survival. In each of the accounts, those characters live through what the readers may regard as an apocalyptic event. Forgetting results in a divide between the infected and uninfected groups, namely, the shadowless and shadowed groups. All of the characters learn how to identify and overcome food, medicine, and transportation inadequacies. According to Doležel (1998, 800), a character’s life is a “vector in multi-dimensional space; at every step, the agent brings about or allows to happen one of the possible changes available to him or her”. Hence, readers need to grasp the narrative dynamics among characters’ mental acts, ethical choices, and communities’ social order in the story. Following this point, M offers an excellent opportunity to reflect contemporary America in the plague crisis, heightening humans’ living tensions together.

In this sense, the postapocalyptic world in the novel is by no means the emergence of the plague and the collapse of the modern world but for those new characters’ optimistic view of contemporary community life. The end of the story is an experience of comprehending the community that cares much about each other’s future, which arouses the reader’s feelings of pity, sorrow, or compassion for the infected characters’ condition. Since Berger (2000, 22) has put forward the concept of “utterly destabilizing disaster” to appeal to us not to consider the idea of postapocalypse itself, it is necessary to imagine “what might come and how we might begin again” (Curtis 2015, 6). In M, memory serves as proof of an individual’s existence, which constitutes the interrelationships among the community, and shadow serves as the identity that distinguishes the infected from the uninfected. Meanwhile, the Forgetting brings starvation and violence and represents a new start of human civilization in the plague’s aftermath. Despite narrating a story about a deadly epidemic that brings the tragic loss of so many lives on earth and extreme hardships to the surviving characters, M emphasizes human relations in community life and how they come to understand and respond to their changed current circumstances and futures. To exacerbate this issue, M inevitably confronts reeling what-if situations in the characters’ ethical dilemmas. In the following section, I use the cognitive narratological approach named possible world narrative to promote the interpretation of this novel.

3 The Possible World Narrative and Potential of Forgetting

The concept of possible worlds (PW) has come up in Gottfried Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710). Some literary scholars such as Thomas Pavel, Umberto Eco, and Marie-Laue Ryan have realized the PW model’s explanatory power for narrative and literary studies in the 1970s. Ryan (1991, 31) has put forward that “the use of the concept of possible worlds to describe the spheres of a fictional system of reality calls for an inquiry into the nature of possibility”. Following Ryan’s point, Ronen (1994, 21) suggests that “the framework of possible worlds attests to the fact that fiction is not an extraordinary phenomenon. It is one among other categories of cultural products that present non-actual state of affairs through language (the same is true of conditionals, descriptions of worlds of desire, belief, and anticipation, and mythical versions of the world)”. Both of them indicate that the core issue of PW theory addresses the relationship between literary fiction and the real world. The application of PW theory to literature studies offers a new outlook on the ontology of fictional objects or worlds. Commonly, reality refers to things we see in the world inhabited by human beings, while PW theory indicates that other possible states of affairs exist. In comparison with the impossible world and the real world, the possible world must be free of contradictions, and it can more or less replace the real world where readers live. In this part, Marie-Laure Ryan’s contribution to PW theory development has primarily offered three sets of valuable tools for conceptualizing the nature of fictionality and itself, mostly helping us deepen the understanding of the potential of Forgetting in M.

The first consists of a series of criteria that define the way readers in an actual world can achieve mental access to fictional worlds. These criteria are called accessibility relations, which include the relevant types as “identity of properties, the identity of inventory, compatibility of inventory, physical compatibility, taxonomic compatibility, logical compatibility, analytical compatibility, and linguistic compatibility” (Ryan 1991, 32–33). Among them, physical compatibility, taxonomic compatibility, and chronological compatibility help define the non-realistic characteristic of M since they provide the conceptual basis for distinguishing the genres of the fictional texts and thereby help us master the general features. Physical compatibility allows the natural laws of the actual world to also be accessible and practical in the textual actual world (TAW). Taxonomic compatibility posits that both the actual world and TAW contain the same species and properties. Nevertheless, there remain various combinations of relations within the two systems, which “does not necessarily correspond to the generic labels in use in a given culture” (Ryan 1991, 43). These two categories included in the novel more or less manifest or violate plague history throughout the history of humankind. However, chronological compatibility remains in the most critical position, and it refers to the condition that “TAW is accessible from AW if it takes no temporal relocation for a member of AW to contemplate the entire history of AW” (Ryan 1991, 32). At the beginning of this part, the narrator’s voice and the narrator seem to witness the entire city falling into infection in a particular period in history, and his voice offers the reader both a geographical and a chronological survey. At the same time, Ory and Max’s sections provide heuristic devices for the sake of illustrating the provisional status of The Forgetting.

The second set of tools is Ryan’s categorization of private worlds of characters that consists of “knowledge-worlds” (“K-world”), “obligation worlds” (“O-world”), and “wish-worlds” (“W-world”) (Ryan 1991, 111). Suppose the private worlds fail to establish relations to the actual world. In that case, recentering will achieve different ontological realms that Ryan entitles “fantasy worlds” (“F-universe”), which “may fulfill metaphorically the function of K-worlds or W-worlds with respect to the primary narrative system” (Ryan 1991, 119). While the characters’ private domains might establish specific versions of a TAW based on knowledge, beliefs, intentions, fantasy worlds establish a relatively independent and stable textual actual subworld connected to other possible subworlds. Such an internal relationship enables a character to dream and believe in their journeys. Readers can immerse themselves not into the TAW but the virtual private worlds and reconstruct the fictive world’s reality in the process of reading. In this sense, fictive private worlds generally bear a striking resemblance and diverge from what we know as reality. It is essential to foreground this question when reading M, which despite its uncertain reference of the title, is not a biography of Ory or Max but a collective narration that focuses on these characters’ desired actions and the public’s dominant, emergent and residual attitudes toward the epidemic. Thus, the readers do not perceive the TAW about Forgetting directly but rather comprehend it through the four characters’ subjective world, including beliefs or hallucinations. In M, a list of postapocalyptic events and the epidemic of amnesia are not factual or actual in the sense that they have not occurred in history, but Shepherd’s M pretends that they do. To stimulate readers’ thinking about the possibilities of the epidemic of amnesia, the narrator uses a series of questions such as “Why had it turned out to be that shadows were the parts of bodies where memories were stored? Why did it happen to some and not others” (Ryan 1991, 13). Several questions are posed with such intensity that they could invite readers to consider the epidemic’s potential threats since the words “some” and “other” have already divided all human beings in the TAW into two types: infected and uninfected. Thus, Max and Ory, who belong to different groups, may be subjected to an incompatible system of rules. Under such circumstances, Ory and Max’s K-world, O-world, and W-world relations are not always static or in harmony but instead changeable or even conflicting with each other, promoting the plot’s continuous development in the story. In other words, “the plot is the trace left by the movement of these worlds within the textual universe” (Ryan 1991, 119), so there remains a considerable conflict between the private worlds of Ory and Max, which effectively propels the development of the plot about the infectious disease. Simultaneously, this TAW in the novel connects the virtual worlds with Ory and Max’s memories, ruminations, and fantasies.

The third tool is the fantasy universe within Ryan’s explanative model for fictionality. She illustrates that it is the “last type of private sphere involved in narrative semantics” since “it is formed by the mind’s creations: dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and fictional stories told to or composed by the characters. These constructs are not simply satellites of TAW (textual actual world), but complete universes, and they are reached by the characters through a recentering” (Ryan 1991, 119). Insofar as this principle holds, this description is compatible with the analysis that considers M as a fictional dream experience disconnected from lively figures in a given disastrous textual reality or the actual catastrophic world. Moreover, “the members of F-worlds have at their disposal the entire array of world-creating activities: the characters in a dream may dream, the heroes of fictional fictions may write fictions. This type of recursive embedding differs from the one we have observed in K-worlds in that it does not propose new points of view on the same system ever but transports the experiencer to ever new realities” (Ryan 1991, 119). In the novel, the narrative consciousness can move from one temporal or geographical place to a completely different one. Taking Part II as an example, the narrative shifts from the U.S. to India. Readers do not assume that this transition is untrue or counterfactual since it is an external recentering from a provisional TAW to another one. Ryan has mentioned that “heroes may write fiction,” indicating that a fantasy universe primarily contains its textual worlds surrounded by many private or possible worlds. For instance, the main experiencers Ory and Max in Arlington are followed by Naz in Boston as the observer, who undertakes the task of introducing the spread of the epidemic from India to the United States at an early stage. At the same time, Hemu Joshi, whose story of observing Forgetting in a predisaster stage, is embedded in Naz’s accounts. According to Ryan, “embedded narratives are story-like constructs contained in the private worlds of characters. These constructs include […] representation concerning past or future states and events: plans, passive projections, desires, beliefs concerning the history of TAW, and beliefs concerning the private representations of other characters” (Ryan 1991, 156). In this sense, Joshi’s narratives are representations that relate the epidemic’s state to Ory, Max and Naz’s current predicament. Forgetting is either correct interpretations of the past or realized projections. Thus, readers can understand how such a string of different characters’ events reflects the factual domain or unrealized possibilities by giving access to the characters’ mental domains’ possible worlds. In addition, Ory, Max, Naz and Hemu Joshi all have their own dream, knowledge, faith and ignorance about this future disaster, which may cause amnesia for people all over the world, so the fantasy universe in this part mainly refers to the character-made creations that involve the psychology of characters in the fictional world. In particular, Naz has mentioned that “no one knew then what the shadowless would lead to. Even when she dreamed about it now, now that she’d seen what it all became, the dream never turned into a nightmare” (Shepherd 2018, 47). Although Naz in the U.S. does not understand that the shadowlessness is the first symptom of amnesia, she also has her imagination toward the unknown disease. Here, Naz’s dream of shadowlessness serves as the inner activity product to identify the infected person. Her vision can draw the fantasy universe into orbit. Although all of them perceive the destructiveness of Forgetting from different perspectives, the characters from different periods or spaces show great concern for this epidemic, and each one prefers to overcome the limitations of the message and geographical boundaries rather than express a negative view toward the emergence of Forgetting.

4 Conclusions

Peng Shepherd’s evocative writing style aims to prioritize the diversity of the cast of characters’ destinations over their journey, so it motivates the readers’ imagination to picture the less natural but possible world of the epidemic of amnesia. As a whole, the fictional plague named Forgetting continuously comes into contact and fuses with reality. Reciprocally, the worlds of desperation, desire, and terror in the text connect with the accepted ways of understanding to provoke readers’ response. Simultaneously, that response may have a notable effect in reshaping readers’ minds as they confront the hidden truths of the epidemic of amnesia. Furthermore, shepherd herself is a writer of color, and she dedicates herself to seamlessly incorporating the diversity of all human beings and the design of the Forgetting in M. She also raises a series of thought-provoking questions such as what is the truth and value of the plague in literature? What is its role and function? How do we reexamine it in contemporary postapocalyptic fiction? It is quite apparent that these are the very problems that Peng Shepherd intends to explore through her excellent strategies of narrative world-making. The Forgetting in M becomes a fictional but accessible world that readers will emerge in their minds to comprehend the narrated events and synthesized elements of postapocalyptic fiction. Furthermore, it invites the reader to evaluate the truth and value of the characters’ behaviors, mental activities, and other forms of activities from cognitive values, moral rules, and esthetic standards. Nowadays, literary theorists have applied the framework of possible worlds to integrate fiction into the broader field of non-actual worlds so it is indispensable to examine the nonactual but unrealized state of the plague in literary texts by analyzing characters’ emotional changes and behaviors. Throughout this novel, the four main characters all have varied capacities to cope with losses and grief in the context of memory loss. Meanwhile, it also provides a fascinating marker of all the characters’ strengths and weaknesses so that readers will observe it through the lens of how they deal with shared feelings such as sorrow, pain, and hopelessness during the process of interpreting this remarkable fiction. Together with contemporary narratology, PW theory provides a notably rigorous analysis of M’s fictional construction and holds great promise for usefulness in approaching work in the twenty-first century. Correspondingly, M could also enrich PW theory studies in its application of the genre of postapocalyptic fiction, shedding light on this robust theoretical framework.