I Am Legend: Synopsis Of The Content

After a nuclear war a mutation stretches over the globe. It transforms every living human being into a vampire. The one human left alive struggles to figure out if the plague can be reserved. Robert Neville comes across many struggles to repel vampires and repair the damage they do, to kill his attackers and dispose of their bodies, and to endure their nocturnal taunts, howling and rock throwing. He has barricated his house and hooked up a generator. Robert escapes through music, art, gallows humor and occasional binge drinking. When he is not preparing for an attack or responding to one, Robert Neville is playing his music loud enough to drown out the sound of the massive crowd of vampires outside his walls or he turns to alcohol for comfort.

Robert Neville is haunted by memories of his wife, who passed away by the disease. He has lost his wife, daughter and his former friend and co-worker to the dread disease. When his wife died, Neville was supposed to burn her body to prevent her from coming back to life. He couldn’t do it, but when she rose from the dead he was forced to kill her.

Now that he’s alone, Neville spends most of his time studying and defending himself from vampires. He begins to conduct experiments, testing the vampires’ sensitivity to sunlight. He soon discovers the cause of the mutation: a bacillus, a form of bacteria. He begins searching for a cure. Each day he has a regular routine of maintenance and vampire killing. He repairs broken or weak sectione of the house and harvests garlic from his hothouse to use as a weapon against the vampires, then starts making wooden stakes. As he gets supplies and gas, Neville occasionally sees things that remind him of how things were before. More often, though, he spends his time and energy trying to stay alive, trying to figure out why the vampire plague does as it does. After his early experiments yield confusing results, Robert theorizes that some of the disease’s effects are psychological, convinced by a sort of mass hysteria obtained from vampire legends. Robert learns how to use the microscope and is able to isolate the bacteria that causes the disease. The discovery is significant as it confirms that the belief in vampires is not based on myths, but is a scientific fact.

We learn that Robert had fought in a war in Panama, which the U.S. won, but brought it’s wake of dust storms, swarms of insects and a plague. Robert is immune to the disease as a result of a bite from a vampire bat which sickened him, but did not kill him.

Robert befriends a stray dog, who seems to have escaped the infection. After finally gaining it’s trust and affection, the dog gets infectied by the vampires and dies.

Two years later, Robert has once again settled into a pattern of day-to-day survival. He has killed off most of the vampires, but the survivors continue to harass him at night.

One day, Neville sees a woman walking in broad daylight. A pretty young woman, named Ruth, who has lost two children to the disease and her husband to a vampire killer. He drags her to his house, demanding to know how she survived the plague. Robert is not al to sure that he can trust her as she is repulsed by garlic. She agrees to let Robert test her blood the next morning. Robert shares all he has learned about vampires with her. They make love. Ruth allows Robert to draw her blood, but begs him not to look at it under the microscope. When he does, he sees that the germ has mutated. Ruth pounds his head with a mallet until he is unconscious and leaves him a note confessing that the mutant vampires have figured out a way to survive and sent her to spy on him and that it was Robert who killed her husband. She professes to love him, and urges him to flee while he still can.

After seven months, Robert observes trained killers from the new vampire society mercilessly execute six vampires. They afterward sift Ben Cortman through with bullets as he attempts to crawl to safety. Next, they smash into Robert’s home. He was prepared to surrender peacefully, however now he believes they are out to kill him, so he shoots them. Robert is seriously injured in the crossfire, and is transported to a prison medical clinic. Ruth visits him and reports that the new society is reclaiming the world with violence. She says that the individuals despise and dread him for murdering such a significant number of them and need him dead. She tells him that he can’t battle them, there is a large number of them. She gives him a packet of pills to make the end easier.

Robert Neville, the last of his kind, prepares to pass into the realm of legends, thus completing the cycle.