‘You’d just come after her’ images of American Literary experience in The last of us

Abstract

The present essay proposes to analyse Naughty Dog studio’s best-seller The Last of Us Remastered through a thematic lens which perceives this video game as a vessel of American mythology, and places it in parallel with literary creations recurrently analysed as identity and cultural artefacts, such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, using Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation as an introductory acknowledgement of the difference in platform and medium. Using American cultural criticism, with special emphasis on Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, points of cultural intersection between the three aforementioned narrative creations will be traced, such as the American duo as recurrent factor in American literary creation, considerations of the natural world in its capacity for meaning in American experience, and the rejection of dominant systems in favour of individuality. Throughout the present essay, such matters will be approached and selected intersections between the main objects of study located in order to argue Naughty Dog’s creation as characteristically American.