World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

The first-person narrator is the individual through whom the story of the Zombie War is related via their interviews with dozens of subjects. According to the narrator, the book is the result of their work for the United Nation’s Postwar Commission Report. While the narrator intended the book to be the commission’s final report, the commission chairperson finds it “too intimate” (1). Since nearly half of the narrator’s work was deleted in the final report, which was pared down to data and statistics, the narrator decides to publish their complete interviews as a separate book 12 years after VA Day has been declared in the United States. They are of the strong opinion that the official report’s cold, hard facts may not be enough to dissuade future generations from making the same mistakes.

The details of the narrator’s character, including gender identity, age, race, nationality, and occupation, are not known. Their ties to the UN’s final commission and access to a broad range of individuals in a wide variety of locations around the world suggests that they are perhaps in a high-ranking position in the UN. The narrator is a peripheral narrator, and, as such, tries to keep their words to a minimum to allow the subjects to do most of the talking.