Please bear in mind that I’m talking about the 1954 Matheson novel, not the 2007 movie starring Will Smith. I’m not going to include options about the movie in the poll, partly because I don’t care about it but mostly … well, actually entirely because I don’t care about it.
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia summary of the novel’s plot.
Did Neville deserve his execution?
Much as I hate to say it, yes. His society is dead, and in the eyes of the new society he’s little more than a terrorist. In any case, they need to put him behind them so that they can develop a viable (no pun intended) system.
He probably did. I’m not sure I agree he was a terrorist, at least not objectively. To the new society, and from their POV, I can see that, but it’s been said (in which movie? I’ve forgotten) that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
At any rate, Neville was doing what he thought was right. He couldn’t lie down and let the vampires run over him.
Did he deserve the imminent execution with suicide option? He was a threat to the new way, and since he couldn’t be rehabilitated/assimilated, he had to be dealt with another way. So yes, he did deserve it.
He thought they were all monsters. They punished him for ignorance. Considering it looks like they were building a vampire fascist state, I’m not sure I trust their opinion. And Ruth could’ve stopped it much earlier, somehow.
Robert Neville is a serial killer - he’s been sneaking into their homes at night and murdering them, and it doesn’t matter that he was confused and didn’t know about the two separate vampire cultures.
So this is really a capital punishment question, yes? I say fry him.
Like Will Munny said, Deserves got nothin’ to do with it.
I agree with the others, he was the lone ‘gunman’ in the new society. if there was the same amount of humans as vampires, then it could be considered that he was just another soldier, as it was he was the vampire societies ‘boogyman’.
What’s “deserve” got to do with it? They needed him dead, and he needed to die, but there was no deserve. I don’t think he deserved to have the whole world change under his feet like that, but it did, and I don’t necessarily think he was right or wrong.
One of my favorite books in the whole world, btw. When I read it I had been blissfully completely unspoiled, and even better, at the end of the book they put in a 40 page preview of some other book, so I didn’t even know the end was coming when it came up and smacked me in the face. I am super disappointed that no movie versions had the guts to stick to the actual ending.
No. He had no idea he was killing sentient beings. They didn’t exactly help, constantly attacking his home and taunting him.
He knew they were sentient. He watched his friend jumping back and forth over the stream of water that Neville set up to test that myth. His friend was testing it. He knew that Neville was testing all the vampire “repellants”. Clearly he is sentient. If he didn’t know, he was dumb. He was working on a cure wasn’t he? But he sure didn’t mind slaughtering wholesale in the meantime.
Exactly. Imagine a virus arrives that hits people different ways; some go completely mad, but others are partially resistant and are trying to mitigate it enough to restore some form of society. That’s what happens in the book, and Neville, unaware of the difference (but fueled by alcohol and depression), takes it on himself to go out and murder the partially resistant when they’re vulnerable.
Like a lot of serial killers I’m sure it made sense to him, but it didn’t reflect the reality of what was going on outside.
Some of the names and pronouns got a bit mixed up there, I’m afraid, at least by my reading - I’m not sure who you’re saying was doing the testing and who knew about that. Neville wasn’t testing anything, unless you mean him trying out different methods of keeping them away? How would that mean he had to know the vampires were sentient?
They kept coming to his house and attacking him - it wasn’t jut him going hunting. And they claimed to be different to the early ‘vampires’ and certainly acted differently, so they are well aware that the early vampires were mindless killers. Neville, however, did not know that there’d been a change.
While testing various anti-vampire theories Neville sets a running stream of water in front of his house to see if it really repels them. His neighbor (and erstwhile friend) Ben Cortman laughs at Neville and then jumps back and forth repeatedly to demonstrate that it doesn’t affect him in any way. So Cortman, though perhaps alone among the attackers, is sentient.
It’s true he doesn’t realize the difference. But still, he’s killing sentient creatures, regardless of any excuse.
At what point is it self-defense though? What other option did he have other than never going out and going insane in his own home?
Perhaps he could have fled but the pandemic appears to have been global. Otherwise he was their enemy and he fought back the only way he knew how.
That doesn’t strike me s demonstrating human-level intelligence - a dog could do that.
Surely the intent make a difference, not just the actions? It does in a court of law.
From the vamps’ POV, he was a mass-murderer, but they knew that he didn’t realise they weren’t like the earlier vamp (who they looked down on), they kept on attacking him, and they decided to kill the last of a sentient species. Kinda hard to feel sorry for them.
I don’t think a dog could recognize an unseen trap based on old lore, and then gloat while triggering the trap.
Given what I recall of the timeline, he killed hundreds if not more than a thousand. I’m not sure what a prosecutor would make of his misguided intentions.
Wait, that’s not right, is it? I thought it was the unbalanced vamps (the ones who had truly gone over) that attacked him every night. Once the ‘lightsiders’ realized his setup they came and killed all those vamps (including Cortman) and tried to take him into custody IIRC.
Vampires had previously been trying to kill him. The onus was on the non-murderous ones to make peace with him.
Please, the onus was on them? I’m a citizen of this wounded land managing to hold my family together in the face of this disease, and then one day some guy who has confused me with someone else breaks into my house and stakes my kid. Repeat a thousand times. The onus is on me? No way. Just because I can empathise with his position doesn’t mean it isn’t murder.
But that’s coming from mysterious place where there’s some unknown monster doing this. Did these vampires all have amnesia? They all had living memory of what the world was like before, right?