Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies focuses heavily upon the human-like qualities of the dead and the zombie-esque nature of the living. The novel establishes Julie, with her love of music, writing, and the like, as a paradigm for humans, and against her the actions and qualities of both the living and dead are contrasted, the most disjoint being the Boneys from the dead, and General Grigio from the living. The Boneys being the dead that have decayed furthest from their former human selves, they stand apart even from the rest of the dead as an organized, faceless unit acting in unison with nearly no remaining aspect, physical or mental, tying them to humanity. The Boneys hold on to antiquated beliefs, explicitly shown during R's attempt to leave with Julie: "We will kill her. That is how things are done. Always has been. Always will be."(81), and otherwise only care about surviving and maintaining the dead, an attitude similar to that of General Grigio, who looks down on Perry's job at Agriculture (95), believing defense against the dead to be the only important duty for the surviving humans, and agriculture to be an unimportant profession due to the existence of Carbtein, the basic nutrients required of food and nothing more, a culinary equivalent of the humanity-deficient Grigio himself.