Perpetual Tipping Points: Unnatural Narratology, Liminality, and Race in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
Perpetual Tipping Points: Unnatural Narratology, Liminality, and Race in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

Summary/Abstract: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One subverts historical rupture by unsettling apocalyptic conventions and collapsing binaries of past/present, life/death, and progress/stasis. Drawing on Jan Alber’s unnatural narratology and Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, this paper argues that the novel reframes survival as recursive inertia rather than renewal. The paper also builds on the concept of perpetual tipping points to describe how the novel’s narrative resists closure through cyclical temporality, bureaucratic monotony, and racial deferral that expose the persistence of systemic failure in a zombified American landscape. Zone One thus becomes a haunting meditation on trauma, race, and the illusion of transformation in the aftermath of collapse.

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