Essay On Survivor's Guilt

Survivor’s guilt is defined in Andrew M. Colman’s Dictionary of Psychology 4th ed., “a feeling of guilt for surviving a tragedy in which others died, often associated with a sense of having been partly responsible for what happened” (Colman 746). In the wake of tragedy, this feeling can be quite common because it’s easier to accept that there was a reason someone died, even if that means the person places the blame on themself. Surviving is more painful in some ways than dying. The survivor lives to see the reverberations and aftermath long after the person dies, in some cases a physical trauma is sometimes one of the effects along with emotional trauma as illustrated by the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Svetlana Alexievich’s …show more content…
Rothberg theorizes that the attack on the Twin Towers, “resonated with more intimate sufferings in ways that suggest how traumas can feed off of each other” (Rothberg 148). In the case of the widow from “Monologues By Those Returned”, she was dealing with losing her husband, her daughter and her mother on top of the Chernobyl disaster. Each one of these would be considered traumatic in it’s own right, but together they increase the pain exponentially. Surviving does not always mean thriving; in the case of many Chernobylites, the people affected by the explosion, they were left permanently affected by the exposure to radiation. More than just the emotional effects, some saw declining health while others saw defects in the children born in the wake of the explosion.
The speaker of “Monologue Of A Damaged Child” is a doctor named Nadezhda Burakova, who had a daughter in tenth grade during the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. She stops once in her story after talking about the fear she sees in people when they talk to the people of Chernobyl. Much of her story surround the way people see Chernobylites, from her daughter to outsiders, unconnected to the disaster who have a fear of the raeven providing some insight about