The Drowned World

The Drowned World portrays a planet that has been ravaged by climate change, but this climate change is not the result of human action. Rather than fossil fuels or pollution, the planet’s climate has been changed by “a series of violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years” (33). Human civilization, as a result, has been destroyed by a random sequence of events millions of miles away. The entire collective endeavor of humanity as a species has been rendered moot by something that is entirely out of human control. The end of the world was a passive event inflicted on humanity by random chance, obliterating any human sense of agency over fate. Kerans was born in the time after civilization. He is a child of a changed world, someone who never knew society as it once was. This contrasts with Bodkin, who grew up in London and possesses treasured memories of the way the world used to be. Tellingly, they both suffer from the same sense of helplessness. This sense of helplessness is brought about by their lack of agency, as they both recognize—as does everyone else—that humanity is a physically weak species at the mercy of powerful, external forces.