The Last Days: Surpassing Obstacles

The Last Days: Surpassing Obstacles

A lot of obstacles are placed in one’s life and it could be something that stops one from achieving their goal. As Moz, Zahler, Pearl, Minerva, and Alana Ray encounter one another to form a band, the devastating crisis of a cannibal apocalypse is placed upon them. The outbreak of a disease draws no concern to the members until they learn their lead singer, who is the key to holding the band together, is infected. The novel The Last Days shows the tough times five teens went through to create a band, from finding the right riff, to recruiting a singer and a drummer, then finding a music rep, and learning that their singer and the whole New York or the world is infected with an unusual disease. The big idea would be surpassing obstacles as the band learned to do when it came to saving the world from the disease epidemic and the cannibals that interfere in their road to fame. This relates to the article, “Man Inspires Class by Overcoming Obstacles.”

The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld is about overcoming obstacles in life either being a scary or difficult one. Teenage guitar players Moz and Zahler always wanted to form a band to be famous, travel around the world, and perform gigs for millions of people. These two come up against an already known situation that has drawn suspicion not among them, but the whole New York. “It was all relative, these days. You had to take your normal where you found it. People went crazy all the time; it was how they went crazy that mattered.”(Westerfeld 9) This quote showed how strange things have happened in New York, that is a disease that made people act crazy when one time, they were normal. Moz experienced it when a crazy lady started to throw her possessions out in a weird way, that including a Stratocaster guitar, which drew the band together. When colliding with Pearl, a musical genius, they decide to form a band with their talents, thus recruiting a singer name Minerva and a drummer name Alana Ray, but Min had a secret no one else knew. “When I first got sick, I hated the sound of her voice, but not anymore. I was getting better…”(Westerfeld 45) This quote showed that Minerva was already infected, having the same crazy symptoms, but has gotten better with some treatment that kept the others from knowing what she truly was. As the band forms, the team faced New York falling to pieces when the worm appeared (disease beast)“We needed to become world-famous soon, while there was still that kind of world to be famous in.”(Westerfeld 118) This quote shows that people were quickly becoming cannibals, but them trying to ignore the cause wasn’t right. As angels, (fighters) people struggling with the infection, come to show that the bands music is the key to defeat the worm, the band agrees to fight it off, relying on their goal to become famous, they will go back to defeated state they once lived in to turn the chaos