Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, especially during the early months of 2020, brought about not only fear and loss, but an unexpected increase in daily vigilance with regard to personal safety and public health among citizens throughout the world. This chapter takes a literary approach to the question of how our minds respond not only to actual pandemics but to textual representations of public health crises, which are examples of planetary and human precarity. Although the feeling of precarity might at first glance appear to be a negative condition, something to be avoided if possible, Kate Rigby suggests in her book Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times, that pandemic novels facilitate the capacity for "mindfulness" and "critical self-reflection". This chapter probes the connection between the complex narrative structures of pandemic fiction and an elevated sense of self-reflective vigilance.