I Am Legend

Remembering the past causes Neville pain, so he switches to studying scientific books in the hopes of unraveling the mystery behind the Undead. He reads about the chemical composition of garlic, noting that garlic’s unique odor is caused by an essential oil called allyl sulfide. Following instructions on how to distill the oil, Neville fills a syringe with pure allyl sulfide. He goes to a nearby house and injects the oil into a sleeping Undead, but nothing happens.

Neville moves on to experimenting with a cross. He takes the sleeping Undead unharmed by his injection and brings her to his house. He restrains her to a chair, waits for nightfall, and holds a cross to her face when she finally awakens. The woman screams and struggles to get away from the cross; she is clearly terrified, but Neville merely becomes more infuriated. He knocks the woman out and shoves her outside for the other Undead to eat her.

After his failed attempt to understand the Undead’s fear of crosses, Neville begins to consider the reaction of those who practiced faiths other than Christianity and Catholicism in their lifetimes. He also does not understand why he himself is immune to infection. To test whether or not the Undead are able to cross moving water (as this weakness is related to vampiric lore), he buries a garden hose across the lawn. That night, Ben Cortman arrives as usual and notices the buried hose. He jumps back and forth over the hose, mocking Neville, who watches through his peephole. Neville opens the door and shoots Ben three times, but it has no effect on the Undead. The former enters a psychosis, losing touch with reality as he begins to drink heavily.

Neville shifts between the memory of Virginia dying from the contagion, the present in which he is drunk and dissociated from reality, and the memory of taking Kathy to the mass grave—as per governmental regulations, “only flames could destroy the bacteria that caused the plague” (61). After bringing Kathy to the grave, Neville had gone to Ben Cortman’s house, only to find him and his wife sleeping during the day, already Undead.

When Virginia died, instead of burning her body, Neville secretly buried her. When night fell, Virginia awoke and escaped from her grave, returning to their house to drink Neville’s blood. Neville’s memories stop there as he passes out from drink.

Neville resolves to be better about drinking to avoid remembering the past. He drives to the Los Angeles Public Library to get more medical and scientific books. He believes blood is the key to understanding the Undead. While walking among the books, Neville bitterly notes how all this information “had no power to save men from perishing” (67). He takes books on physiology, bacteriology, and immunology.

Back home, Neville reads about the lymphatic system. His reading includes the fact that strong sunlight kills most germs, which causes him to reconsider the germ theory that he and many others disregarded at the beginning of the contagion. Due to the rapid spread of the contagion, Neville begins to believe that mosquitos and other insects were part of the spread, as well as the dust storms. Though the germ theory would explain many of the Undead’s behavior, it does not explain the symptoms related to vampiric lore—such as their fear of garlic, mirrors, and the cross (and aversion to moving water).