Neville is the central character of the novel, and is stuck with only himself and his dog. He believes himself to be the legend that will help save the world, and must keep motivated to escape from the confines of his home and hope for a better future later. He desperately desires a companionship that is unavailable to him, so his way of escaping is an unhealthy one. He uses his alcohol to drown out the noise around him at night, and is using this as a way to escape from the terrors of reality that is surrounding him. There is not much hope left in the world for him to believe in, but he does not give up. He cannot be considered an optimistic man due to the vice of alcohol that he partakes in, but he still holds on to the hope that reality could possibly change in the future. He wishes to have another survivor there with him to keep him company because his dog cannot speak with him.
The one hope that keeps him alive is surprisingly one of the vampires that awaits outside of his house every night. He hopes to find his neighbor, rival, and friend Ben Cortman, who is now a vampire, and to kill him. One can only take so much egging on by the undead before they begin to go a little mad. Neville may have lost part of his will to live, but revenge is a driving force that spurs on humans to live past the point that they wish to. He does reach low points, and uses alcohol to escape, but because he has the hope of meeting a companion and another hope of exacting revenge on his friend, he is able to pull through all of the hardships that he is facing.
Neville is able to use his dog as a sign of the hope that he has, and even ignored the idea of mocking prayer when the dog is sick and dies and "managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog" (Matheson ). He is nothing without having a companion, and hopes that there is a God out there who will be merciful to his beloved companion who was always there for him. By the end of the novel he faces the new society that the new vampires have shown him, and is shown that he must warn them against being to brutal and aggressive or they will end up as he did. Lonely and with the only escape being death in the very end. He recognizes that many things that gave him hope in the earlier parts of the novel were deprived of humanity, and that the only way for him to finally escape from it all is not to hope for a better society for himself. It is to long for a death that takes him away, and to hope that the new vampire society will see the faults in their ways.
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