Freie Universität Berli “Is this really all they had to worry about? ” Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us Michael Fuchs Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic survival horror game The Last of Us (2013) is mainly set twenty years after the outbreak of a mutant fungus which transforms human beings into zombie-like creatures. The game focuses on the story of Joel, who lost his daughter the day of the outbreak, and Ellie, a fourteen-year-old who embodies hope for humankind’s survival, as she seems to be the only human being immune to the infection. In the narrative’s concluding moments, Joel is unwilling to sacrifice the girl to distil a cure from her brain tissue. When she inquires whether the doctors were successful, Joel lies, telling her that she is not the only one immune to the infection, after all. In this way, he consciously re-constructs the past and tries to define its future meaning. Joel’s lie highlights the significance of spectral hauntings to the game text, as the suppressed knowledge of him killing dozens of people in order to save Ellie will inevitably come back to haunt them. Accordingly, the past and future are entangled in intricate ways, as (re-)collections of the past shape both individuals’ and the nation’s present and future. These influences of both the past and the present on the future-to-come are particularly relevant in the context of the future orientation of the American nation. Indeed, The Last of Us, this article argues, suggests that a future irrevocably altered by anthropogenic actions haunts this key American narrative. 1. Playing with Futures Past In his book After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (1999), James Berger argues that the apocalypse “must in its destructive moment clarify and illuminate the true nature of what has been brought to an end” (1999: 5). In order to reflect on the changes the apocalyptic moment introduced AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0004 Michael Fuchs 68 “something” must “remain […] after the end” (Berger 1999: 6; italics in original). Apocalyptic tales, Berger observes here, do not simply end, but require the anticipation of the ‘after-end’ for the apocalypse to become meaningful. Accordingly, Berger distils a clear chronology characteristic of post-apocalyptic narratives - there is a time before the apocalyptic moment (often just remembered and/ or commemorated), there is the apocalyptic moment, and there is the post-apocalyptic world. Crucially, Berger suggests that apocalyptic events annihilate the known world and erase cultural memory. The apocalypse thus introduces both a new historical chronology and establishes a new kind of temporality, as the post-apocalyptic world removes itself from the pre-apocalyptic world; the post-apocalyptic reality is disentangled from the past. However, this past may still “be reconstructed by means of […] traces, remains, survivors, and ghosts” (1999: 19), as Berger remarks. These “traces, remains, survivors, and ghosts” collapse the strict boundaries between temporal dimensions. Indeed, as Gayatari Spivak notes in the introduction to her translation of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie (1967), the trace “is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present” (1997: xvii). Similarly, in Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida himself explains that specters are “neither […] present nor absent” (2006: 63), but always present without really being present. These ghostly presences disrupt “both oppositional thinking and the linearity of historical chronology” (Weinstock 2004: 5). Berger acknowledges as much when he remarks, “Everything after the end, in order to gain, or borrow, meaning, must point back, lead back to that time” (1999: xi). The end (and the afterend) accordingly reveals its intricate ties to its prior and exposes the ways in which the past has caused the apocalyptic moment and/ or the ways in which the ‘after’ differs from what came before. In either case, whereas the temporal categories of past, present, and future may appear to be easily distinguishable, below the surface, these temporal layers are entangled in intricate ways. Video games simultaneously contribute to and expose the complex entanglements between temporal dimensions in very specific ways, as the medium “offers a very different temporal experience than our other media” (Atkins 2007: 251). In particular, video game scholar Jesper Juul has diagnosed “an inherent conflict between the now of the interaction and the past or ‘prior’ of the narrative” in video games (2001). “Video games,” Christopher Hanson has explained more recently, “enable players to experience […] time in ways that transcend other media” (2018: 2). The opening sequence of Naughty Dog’s triple-A title The Last of Us (2013) makes explicit video games’ particular ways of engaging with time. Originally published in July 2013, the game’s narrative opens in the fall of 2013, near Austin, Texas. Accordingly, for players who started the game right upon the original release date, the game was set in the future. Yet when playing the game a few weeks after its release or when simply Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 69 thinking of the year of 2013 as the ‘now,’ the game was set in the present. Alternatively, from today’s perspective, 2013 is, of course, located in the past. Significantly, when considering a setting in the future or in the past, video games’ particular relationship to time adds to the complexities, as playing “has a basic sense of happening […] now,” since “[p]ressing a key [instantaneously] influences the game world, which then logically (and intuitively) has to be happening in the same now” (Juul 2004: 134; italics in original), thereby collapsing the artificial differentiations between these temporal dimensions. In the game text’s opening minutes, single dad Joel and his daughter Sarah witness the outbreak of a mutant fungus which transforms human beings into zombie-like creatures. Sarah dies that same night, killed by an American soldier whose task is to contain the threat and protect civilians. After about twenty minutes of playing time, the narrative jumps to the year 2033, as the present moment of gameplay converges with the future and the present of narration. In the twenty years since the outbreak, the mutant fungus has practically eradicated the population of the United States. The remaining survivors live in military quarantine zones located in (former) urban centers, in nomad groups roaming the country, or in isolated settlements in the countryside. In Boston, Joel meets Ellie, a fourteen-year-old girl who becomes the physical manifestation of the loss which has been haunting him since the day of the outbreak. In addition, Ellie emerges as the only hope for humankind, as she is immune to infection caused by the fungal attack on the human brain. A group known as the Fireflies, which has ties to both Ellie and Joel, hopes to distil a cure from Ellie’s body and thus save humankind. As the group’s doctors and scientists are not close by, Joel and Ellie embark on a journey which leads them farther and farther westward. As I will demonstrate in this article, both the constant presence of Sarah’s absence and the sheer omnipresence of cultural artifacts from the 1980s and 2013 in 2033 underscore the significance of the past to the future imagined in The Last of Us. Indeed, from Joel’s attempts to work through his traumatic loss to the ways in which the narrative draws on distinctly American myths, traces of the past constantly appear and re-appear in the course of the narrative. The Last of Us thus underlines the undeniable interrelations between the past and the present, which provide templates for, and thus shape, the future. However, this future, which plays such a fundamental role in the American imagination, is haunted by the effects of past and present (and future) ecologically unsustainable anthropogenic actions. In this way, The Last of Us exposes a considerable tension between the construction of a future based on past ideals which ignore the realities of life in the Anthropocene. Michael Fuchs 70 2. Stepping into the Museum, Going West, and the Archive of Popular Culture: Collective Hauntings in The Last of Us Collective memory, as Astrid Erll has explained, is the stock of cultural artifacts that “a society preserves” and the associated cultural narratives it seeks to circulate (2006: 181). Jan Assmann has elaborated on this idea, remarking that collective memory “is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)” (1995: 129). Thus, all cultural practices reflect and feed off collective memory; cultural products are necessarily haunted by traces of the past. At the same time, collective memory incorporates these cultural artifacts and performances, which come to haunt the future by providing particular narrative templates and behavioral as well as performative scripts. As Susanne Hamscha has noted, “As an archive of images, affects, and desires that stimulate imaginings of ‘America,’ the cultural imaginary depends on constant reiteration” (2013: 15). Accordingly, images which conjure up ghosts of the past are projected into the future. In the American context, these images often evoke a limited set of “‘foundational scenarios’ that have come to define a distinctly American culture” (Hamscha 2013: 16; italics in original). For example, in The Last of Us, Joel, Ellie, and Joel’s friend Tess reach an abandoned museum. As they traverse a floor devoted to the Revolutionary War, they come face to face with the founding of the American nation (see Illustration 1). This museum provides a textbook example of what Pierre Nora has referred to as a ‘lieu de mémoire,’ which is “[c]reated by a play of memory and history” (1989: 19). The French historian considers this dialog between memory and history as playful, for rather than being contained in the past, sites of memory demonstrate how past moments become commemorated, thereby transcending their temporal compartmentalization in the past by being visible in the present moment and potentially preserved for eternity. The museum’s level of decay literalizes sociocultural cracks, which come to the fore in the post-apocalyptic world. The facts that the museum has evidently long been deserted and that Joel and company quickly pass through the building - rather than worship past leaders and show reverence for past events - suggest that the society in place after the outbreak has decided to devalue these past moments and tries to leave the related myths behind. The brief scene set in the museum characterizes post-apocalyptic America as a decidedly anti-heroic society. America has forsaken the idealization of the Founding Fathers and the nation’s foundational myths - which begs the question as to whether this post-apocalyptic America may still be considered America. Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 71 Illustration 1: Walking through memories (and memorials) of the Revolutionary War in The Last of Us. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). Moreover, this abandoning of cultural narratives central to American selffashioning conveys a critique of (pre-apocalypse) America and the myths - and the attendant ideas - the nation (largely) still clings to. This critical stance also manifests in the symbolism of Joel and Ellie’s journey. After all, their route across America could hardly be more mythical in scope, since they tread on paths similar to the pioneers of the nineteenth century. However, Joel and Ellie’s westward journey re-configures the myth of American progress, as they start in the Cradle of Liberty, pass the steel mills of Pittsburgh, travel through the Centennial State, and then move farther west, toward the future - only to return back east, as their story concludes in Wyoming. Significantly, the goal of Joel and Ellie’s voyage is repeatedly re-defined, thereby echoing the notion of America as a nation which incessantly moves forward and thus remains perpetually “unfinished” (Lerner 1959). As Joel and Ellie travel farther west, Salt Lake City seems to emerge as their final destination. To be sure, while Salt Lake City’s role in the American imagination pales in comparison with New York City, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles, for the Mormons, the Crossroads of the West was the place from whence they meant to conquer the entire continent (Olsen 2002). Similar to the City upon a Hill, Utah’s capital is a utopian space symbolically charged with hopes, dreams, and possibilities. The city functions as a point of departure, another beginning, geographically located far in the west of the continent. The Mormon city accordingly draws on the cultural meaning invested into the West. After all, the conquest of the West Coast might have marked the closing of the frontier, but it simultaneously Michael Fuchs 72 molded the Frontier into mythical shape, a symbol which may be projected onto ever new objects, places, and ideas, “extending” the “frontier into new regions” (Turner 1920) - first toward the sky, later into cyberspace, which made possible America’s “perennial rebirth” (Turner 1920: 2). Technological progress and Americans’ need to control nature has driven the nation’s westward progress. In this context, Salt Lake City’s significance becomes particularly pertinent. The city is home to the ‘Mormon Grid’ - a rigid urban planning pattern which, arguably, presents the climax of America’s conceptualization of the city as built environment. However, when Joel and Ellie first encounter giraffes in a space which traditionally emblematizes Americans’ desire “to control the wilderness into a contained and disciplined environment” (Campbell/ Kean 1997: 160), and Joel then decides not to entrust the future of humanity to science but rather to believe in the restorative power of nature (in the form of a mutated fungus) to rid itself of humankind in order to constrain the anthropogenic destruction of the planet, these moments underline that Joel and Ellie repeatedly stray off well-trodden paths which epitomize the American experience. Similar to their mythic predecessors, Joel and Ellie erase and re-write history, but with a different goal in mind - the improvement of the planet rather than the betterment of humankind. Illustration 2: Giraffes roam the streets of the abandoned human environment. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). To be sure, the game text’s conscious challenging of cultural narratives deeply engrained in the American psyche creates a paradox. After all, The Last of Us also evokes America’s pastoralist tradition through the merging of nature and the city in its depiction of Salt Lake City and other urban environments. For example, James L. Machor has noted that “a more Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 73 meaningful life is possible closer to nature” (1987: 3) but still within the limits of the city if nature is simply given sufficient freedom to develop. This is echoed in the characters’ relation to the period directly preceding the apocalyptic event. When Ellie, for example, notices one of the numerous Dawn of the Wolf posters which are plastered across the gameworld (see Illustration 3), she remarks, “These posters are everywhere” (Naughty Dog 2014). Joel admits that he “saw this right before the outbreak” and explains, “It’s a dumb teen movie” (Naughty Dog 2014). Obviously, the grumpy father figure feels that life before the outbreak of the mutation was rather insignificant, a notion Ellie supports when she flips through a teenage girl’s diary and wonders, “Is this really all they had to worry about? Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt? It’s bizarre” (Naughty Dog 2014). Illustration 3: The omnipresent Dawn of the Wolf expose the vacuity of the time predating the outbreak of the mutant fungus. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). Joel and Ellie’s comments serve as thinly veiled paternalistic assessments of the commercial juggernaut that is Twilight and its (primarily) teenage female fan base. Yet beyond parodying Twilight, Dawn of the Wolf represents the nation’s state of mind during the pre-outbreak era. The critique The Last of Us levels against this period is rooted in its perceived depthlessness, which threatened “to sink” everything “to the level of sheer decoration” (Jameson 1991: 7) - ideas encapsulated by Dawn of the Wolf. The superficiality of the immediate past contrasts with the gory and gritty reality of life in 2033. Crucially, players experience this harsh and uncompromising reality in the form of a simulated environment. In an add-on to The Last of Us, titled Michael Fuchs 74 Left Behind (2014), the game text touches on this paradox of trying to access reality though a simulation. In an abandoned arcade hall, Ellie discovers a game called The Turning. Unfortunately, “it’s busted” (Naughty Dog 2014). But this does not stop Ellie from ‘playing’ the game, as her friend Riley suggests that she closed her eyes and gave herself in to the illusion created by Riley’s words (see Illustration 4). Players follow Ellie’s lead and play the Street Fighter-esque game without being able to see the gamewithin-the-game on their screens. The metatextual (and metaludic) moment, which draws on players’ knowledge of fighting games, “welcome[s]” players “to the desert of the Real” (Žižek 2002), as the game-within-thegame confronts players with processes “of substituting the signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard 1994b: 2). Here, The Last of Us exposes reality’s artificial character by way of an arcade game that is only accessible through words, sounds, health bars, and the pushing of buttons. In this way, The Last of Us not only sketches a micro-history of its medium but also, more importantly, taps into the nostalgia for the 1980s, which has pervaded popular culture in the 2010s. Revealingly, Ellie repeatedly highlights the affects and emotions arcade games produce. In particular, they represent a past era in which “kids […] were so fucking lucky,” as she puts it in the prequel comic (Druckmann/ Hicks 2013). By exposing the disconnect between Ellie and the 1980s (represented by the arcade game), The Last of Us suggests that nostalgia can only reach its full potential “[w]hen the real is no longer what it was” (Baudrillard 1994b: 6) and, thus, transforms into a “nostalgia for the lost referential” (Baudrillard 1994a: 44). Significantly, the game text communicates this idea through the use of a simulated, post-apocalyptic environment that retrogressed to an earlier stage in the development of the semiosphere (before signs engulfed and replaced reality) and exposes the irreferentiality of the previous age (i.e., the 2010s). Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 75 Illustration 4: Ellie imagines playing an arcade game; and the game asks players to do the same. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). The Last of Us diagnoses nostalgia as a general condition, not restricted to Ellie. Indeed, post-apocalyptic America at large suffers from collective nostalgia in some shape or form. For example, Winston, a soldier stationed at a Boston mall, notes, “I miss the holiday lights. Everyone was all stressed out trying to buy gifts, but you felt this sort of magic cheer in the air” (Druckmann & Hicks 2013). On the other hand, Sam, a thirteen-year-old boy who - together with his older brother Henry - accompanies Joel and Ellie for some time, never makes his appreciation for the past explicit, but the ways in which he talks about ice cream trucks when seeing one and the ways in which he cherishes a robot that looks incredibly like the Transformer Snowflake speak volumes about the feelings he has invested in these objects. The fact that one of these objects is a Transformer action figure not only connects Sam’s longing for simpler times to a feeling of having been robbed of his childhood and a yearning for change, but also draws on the real-world nostalgia of players who grew up in the 1980s and “the string of 1980s blockbuster nostalgia pervading modern Hollywood” (Sperb 2016: 128). As much as the characters express disdain for the past and its ignorance, they also cannot help but idealize the same ignorance - nostalgia constructs a past moment in time when life was, irrespective of the ‘complications’ and ‘complexities’ a life defined by abundance and affluence holds, easier than the daily struggle for survival faced in the postapocalyptic world Joel and Ellie inhabit. Notably, the post-apocalyptic world is a world implicitly altered by the effects of climate change - since climate change is irreversible and will Michael Fuchs 76 affect the future. Even though scientists explicitly warned of the long-term effects of carbon dioxide emissions as early as 1938 (Callendar 1938), it was not until the 1980s that the ‘greenhouse effect’ became sufficiently prominent to be publicly discussed. However, Americans, in particular, were (and many still are) ignorant of the causes of global warming. Accordingly, the decade of the 1980s also functions as a more innocent era when it comes to ecological questions - a time when anthropogenic pollution purportedly had not really been a problem yet. 3. Watches and Photographs: Personal Hauntings in The Last of Us Despite Joel’s no-nonsense attitude, he also struggles with his past. Its powerful grip on Joel’s present comes to the fore when he spends some time alone with Ellie for the first time. When leaving Boston, they wait for night to come, bunkered up in a building close to the quarantine zone’s border. As Joel tries to catch a nap, Ellie notes that his “watch is broken” (Naughty Dog 2014). This innocent remark not only acknowledges that in the postapocalyptic world depicted in The Last of Us, people’s daily routines no longer adhere to the artificial rhythm of clock time, but also stresses the significance of the broken object, which his daughter gave him as a birthday present the night she died. The watch is a constant reminder of that night. However, Joel does not really need the watch in order to remember the night, as he has constant nightmares about it. Sigmund Freud argued that dreams return the traumatized individual to the traumatic event, “from which he wakes up in another fright” (2001: 13). “These dreams […] are endeavouring to master” the traumatic experience (Freud 2001: 32), but they cannot do so and are thus doomed to repeat and return Joel to his site and moment of loss. Since the traumatic experience is bound to recur, “the future promises not unknown possibilities for fulfilling desire, but new occasions for the repetition of the fundamental loss that defines the subject” (McGowan 2011: xi). The conceptualization of time thus implied is different from traditional notions of cause and effect as well as progress. After all, traumatic experiences “are not ordered temporally” and “time does not change them in any way” (Freud 2001: 28). In this way, the past not merely predetermines the future, but effectively becomes the future. Although the traumatic event causes its repetition, it is also the effect of its re-experience. Accordingly, causes are, somewhat paradoxically, both causes of effects and their effects. As a result, trauma produces temporal chaos - or an entirely new temporality. This emergence of a new temporality caused by trauma shares certain features with the Anthropocene condition. “[S]udden event[s] of extreme violence” (Rothberg 2014: xiv) and the “slow violence” of environmental Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 77 catastrophe, which is “typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011: 2), result in the entanglement of singular moments of human experience and the vast scale of Earth history. Human beings are “implicated subject[s]” in both of these temporal dimensions - “neither simply perpetrator nor victim” (Rothberg 2014: xv); they are rather always-already simultaneously “perpetrator and victim” (Beck 1992: 38; italics in original). Either of these roles may, of course, entail traumatic experiences; more importantly, the constant friction between anthropocentric thinking and geological timescales permanently disrupts the human subject. The trauma thus repeatedly experienced is located in the past and in the present, but also just as much in the future, as future environmental and personal catastrophe seems unavoidable. Whereas Joel subconsciously constantly revisits his traumatic experience, his conscious self seeks to banish Sarah’s loss to the past and contain (and control) his daughter’s memory. “Things happen… and we move on” (Naughty Dog 2014; pause in original), he tells Ellie after burying their companions Sam and Henry. This desire explains his first, rather indifferent, if not hostile, reactions toward Ellie. Even if Ellie might not be Sarah’s spitting image, the two girls are similar enough in their looks, their behaviors, and their age that Ellie becomes a manifestation of Sarah’s physical absence. Following Derrida, Ellie thus performs “a paradoxical incorporation” (2006: 6); through the symbolical equation of the two girls, Ellie effectively disappears in the becoming-present memory of Sarah, who is symbolically resurrected. Yet Sarah also transcends death through the medium of photography (see Illustration 5). Photographs, Roland Barthes has argued, do “not call up the past” (1981: 82). Marguerite Duras has taken this argument a step further, noting that “photographs promote forgetting” (1990: 89), which is why “the Photograph never, in essence, [is] a memory,” but, in fact, rather “blocks memory” (Barthes 1981: 91). This blockage results from the simulacral, seemingly eternal present photographs construct. Since the present always remains present, the past can never be past. Rather, the past serves as a gateway to the now. For Sarah, the photograph of a past moment, which captured her while still being alive, offers her access to the sphere of mortals. Similarly, while the post-apocalyptic society seeks to erase past wrongs, it simultaneously lives in a world that has resulted from these past errors. On another level, photographs are defined by an aura of authenticity unlike any other medium. Barthes has concluded that (analog) photography requires a “real thing which has been placed before the lens,” since without the material object, “there would be no photograph” (1981: 76). This argument does, however, not promote an overly simplistic understanding of photographs as “‘copies’ of reality” (Barthes 1981: 88). Instead, photographs “emanat[e a] past reality” (Barthes 1981: 89). They are Michael Fuchs 78 assumed to capture physical reality and are thus endowed with “an evidential force” (Barthes 1981: 89), which creates the illusion of indexical reference. Illustration 5: The photograph effectively resurrects Sarah. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). Even if photographs connote ‘reality,’ Barthes acknowledged that they are cultural constructs in so far as they are produced by socio-historical and aesthetic contexts. Significantly, the photograph featuring Sarah also depicts her father, Joel. The two seem to be having a fun time together after a soccer game; it is a family photo. Marianne Hirsch has noted that family photos “immobilize[] the flow of family life” and “perpetuate[] familial myths while seeming merely to record actual moments in family history” (1997: 7). Photography’s selective memory “reduce[s] the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images that real families cannot uphold” (Hirsch 1997: 7). Indeed, the image of Joel and Sarah, united in their enjoyment of life, constructs the illusion of familial harmony despite the looming absence of Sarah’s mother. At the same time, the photograph displaces any negative feelings associated with the family by presenting an image of cohesion. A photograph of Joel, Tommy, and Sarah seen in earlier in the game supports this notion. There are no signs of the discord between Joel and Tommy, and Sarah is still alive in the photograph. Likewise, the realities of environmental destruction (very much present in the 2010s, of course) are also glossed over. As Hirsch elaborates, the family is “a last vestige of protection against war, racism, exile, and cultural displacement” (1997: 13). Therefore, she continues, the family “becomes particularly vulnerable to […] violent ruptures, and so a measure of their devastation” (1997: 13). Sarah’s death and Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 79 the brothers’ various disagreements provide illustrative examples of these processes at work, as Joel’s family functions as a microcosm of life in the post-apocalyptic world. In addition, reflecting on Barthes’s elaborations on his dead mother’s photos, Hirsch argues that photographs have the power “to wound, repel and exclude” (1997: 2). When Ellie finally hands over the photo depicting Joel and Sarah, Joel takes a few deep breaths, apparently overwhelmed by the unexpected emotional effect the image has on him, by the old wounds that are re-opened. At the same time, he can see the chasm separating him from his beloved daughter. The photograph thus “provokes a moment of self-recognition” (Hirsch 1997: 2), as Joel begins to understand that he has been trying to escape his own past for the past twenty years. Beyond working through his daughter’s loss, the confrontation with the past and the attendant encounter with death also holds self-knowledge, since photographs of people are haunted by “the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction” (Sontag 2005: 55). When Joel looks at Sarah’s photograph, he not only confronts her death, but also his own mortality, which harbingers the impending vanishing of humankind. Indeed, this moment of confronting death and - at least in some way - finally making peace with the past proves key to Joel’s acceptance of humanity’s (potential) demise, which leads to him sparing Ellie’s life and accepting the annihilation of Homo sapiens in the game’s concluding moments. 4. After the End: Memory in the Post-Apocalyptic World of The Last of Us Post-apocalyptic tales suggest a reset that often projects the recovery of an idealized past into the future-to-come. In other words, the apocalyptic moment returns a people to its mythic beginnings. Thus, it seems only appropriate to evoke this rhetorical gesture typical of post-apocalyptic narratives by returning to James Berger’s elaborations on the post-apocalypse (which opened this article). In his book’s introduction, Berger writes that “nearly every apocalyptic text presents the same paradox[: ] The end is never the end” (1999: 5). Not surprisingly, in The Last of Us, the outbreak of the fungus which transforms human beings into zombie-like creatures is not the end of civilization, but the end of life as spoiled First-Worlders know it. Likewise, the game’s conclusion did not signify the tale’s ending. The add-on, released about half a year after the core game, simultaneously functions as a prequel to the main game (temporally located after the prequel comic series) and bridges the time between chapters eight (at the conclusion of which Joel suffers a serious injury) and nine (at the beginning of which Joel is - quite literally - not out of the woods yet), as the narrative constantly alternates between events before Ellie and Joel met and Ellie’s struggle to ensure Joel’s survival. Michael Fuchs 80 More importantly, however, the game’s final moments emphasize the significance of the (construction of the) past. When Ellie asks Joel what happened when she was supposed to have her operation, he tells her that it turned out she is not the only one immune to the infection. Joel lies, for once he came to understand that Ellie should be sacrificed, he not only killed Ellie’s mother figure Marlene and dozens of other people, but also denied humanity the hope to re-claim its dominion over the planet. By lying, Joel effectively re-writes the past, whose impact on the present is made explicit by showing a flashback of Marlene’s murder just before he answers Ellie’s question. Ellie’s reaction to Joel’s words indicates that she is well aware of the lie, but she accepts it. Her acceptance implies that Joel and Ellie will live with the lie and (try to) forget the truth of what really happened. In this way, the game text acknowledges that memory depends on remembering as much as on forgetting, as Ellie and Joel implicitly agree to forget what happened in the hospital. 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