Primary Text: Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Excerpt from David A. Davis's article "The Forgotten Apocalypse: Katherine Anne Porter's 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider,' Traumatic Memory, And The Influenza Pandemic Of 1918." published in The Southern Literary Journal 2 (2011): 55.

As Katherine Anne Porter’s short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” opens, Miranda fitfully endures a vivid nightmare. She sees her- self on horseback desperately racing from Death, the pale rider, who has already taken her grandfather, an aunt, a cousin, her “decrepit hound, and [her] silver kitten,” and when he reaches her, she realizes that “he is no stranger to [her]” (270). Her nightmare tangles images of life and death with images of remembering and forgetting, and the relationship between survival and memory is a recurring motif in the story. Porter’s allusion to the apocalyptic horseman described in Revelation proves to be appropriate because the story takes places during the influenza pandemic of 1918, the greatest public health catastrophe in modern history. The interplay between death and memory in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” gives an aesthetic dimension to the pandemic’s horrifying consequences and raises questions about literature as a form of traumatic memory. […] Few references to the 1918 pandemic exist in literature, popular culture, or even in history books, which makes Porter’s story an important record of the outbreak.

Porter based “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” on her personal experience as an influenza survivor, and it is the most significant American literary work set during the pandemic. The novella illustrates the varieties of traumatic experience—personal trauma, cultural trauma, historical trauma, and aesthetic trauma. he story takes place in a unique and profound historical context, both because of Porter’s personal traumatic experience and because memories of the pandemic have faded.