Pandemic Literature: An Escape Into Reality | Against Escapism

Fiction often offers an alternate reality away from daily struggles that readers face. Pale Horse, Pale Rider written by Katherine Anne Porter is a book containing three short stories, “Old Mortality”, “Noon Wine”, and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, each portraying a fictional recount of the experience had by people living through 1918: World War 1 and the Spanish Influenza. Nothing about this book is pretty; nothing about this book offers an escape from reality; I love it for that. 

Porter has an excellent handle on writing about an extremely sensitive time in people’s lives while not using language too simple or complex and not smoothing over its grave impact. It is important to note that Porter writes from experience. In her life, she faced great hardship including living through a war, the Spanish Influenza Pandemic, many issues in relationships with people, and a very close encounter with death (Givner 20). This is examined in the book by her character Miranda. During an encounter with death, Miranda’s vision and her surroundings turn from all-white to a grey haze. While reading, I was able to gain an understanding that while she did not pass away, she was met with such depression and detachment from herself. 

Miranda lost so much of herself even though she survived, and that is the important reality of a pandemic. Living through it does not discount the terrible feelings you gain after it. The writing of these three short stories does not beautifully paint over or romanticize the terrible pandemic people lived through, and that is extremely vital in readers’ discernment of the time examined in her writing. “The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end?” 

Authenticity in literature concerning tragedies that have occurred is needed greatly. I would recommend everyone read writing like this, but not everyone will like it. Porter has brilliantly captured in a holistic way what people living through the Spanish Influenza encountered. Her style in which she writes allows for nothing left to the imagination and creates the world you need to see to understand and gain empathy for the characters and situations they face. Anything that is included inside of the three short stories has no remorse for the readers, and this is what makes it so remarkable. I have never come across fiction like this. As anxious of a person as I am, it left me with the realization that without an outlet like writing, many people would not be able to deal with serious situations they face, in this case, a pandemic. 

Pale Horse, Pale Rider examines the struggles of war, a great pandemic, and near-death experiences and its after-effects. During this current pandemic we find ourselves living in, I have lost friends and family members. Death, trepidation, and suffering never become easy occurrences to cope with. I find solace knowing there is writing like Porter’s I can read to not feel alone. We will never forget the terrible tremor of a pandemic but we can remember the way it impacted the people left in its path. The last line, a line that will stay with me forever: “No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.” 

Works Cited

Givner J. Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press; 1991.

Porter KA. Pale Horse, Pale Rider: three short novels. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company; 1939.